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Summary
Summary
A captivating, atmospheric return to historical fiction that is every bit as convincing and engrossing as Martin's landmark Mary Reilly .
In 1872 the American merchant vessel Mary Celeste was discovered adrift off the coast of Spain. Her cargo was intact and there was no sign of struggle, but the crew was gone. They were never found.
This maritime mystery lies at the center of an intricate narrative branching through the highest levels of late-nineteenth-century literary society. While on a voyage to Africa, a rather hard-up and unproven young writer named Arthur Conan Doyle hears of the Mary Celeste and decides to write an outlandish short story about what took place. This story causes quite a sensation back in the United States, particularly between sought-after Philadelphia spiritualist medium Violet Petra and a rational-minded journalist named Phoebe Grant, who is seeking to expose Petra as a fraud. Then there is the family of the Mary Celeste 's captain, a family linked to the sea for generations and marked repeatedly by tragedy. Each member of this ensemble cast holds a critical piece to the puzzle of the Mary Celeste .
These three elements--a ship found sailing without a crew, a famous writer on the verge of enormous success, and the rise of an unorthodox and heretical religious fervor--converge in unexpected ways, in diaries, in letters, in safe harbors and rough seas. In a haunted, death-obsessed age, a ghost ship appearing in the mist is by turns a provocative mystery, an inspiration to creativity, and a tragic story of the disappearance of a family and of a bond between husband and wife that, for one moment, transcends the impenetrable barrier of death.
Author Notes
Valerie Martin is the author of six novels & two collections of short fiction, including "Italian Fever", "The Great Divorce", & "Mary Reilly". She lived in Italy for three years & now resides in upstate New York.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Martin (Property) uses one of the most baffling maritime mysteries of all time as the starting point for a complex exploration of several different characters, including Arthur Conan Doyle. The melancholic and moving prologue, set in 1859, foreshadows the disaster that befalls a ship named Early Dawn. In 1872, the brig Mary Celeste, en route from New York to Genoa, is found floating at sea, no one aboard, and no real clues as to what happened to its crew of seven, including the captain, Benjamin Briggs; his wife; and his daughter. A decade later, Doyle, who has not yet created Sherlock Holmes, writes a fictional account of the ship's fate, in which a lunatic passenger is responsible for a massacre of the others onboard. "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement" elicits strong reactions from those who knew the Briggs family. Martin is less concerned with exploring theories about what actually happened than in the repercussions of the baffling disappearances, in a manner that will remind some of the Australian writer Joan Lindsay. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Martin's latest novel delves into the lingering questions surrounding the Mary Celeste, an American brig found drifting, intact but abandoned, in the open Atlantic in 1872. Eschewing a traditional linear narrative for an unconventional yet far more effective structure, Martin creates what seem at first to be loosely connected vignettes. Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote a sensationalist tale about the ship's fate in his youth, appears at several different points in his life, and a journalist crosses paths several times with an enigmatic medium she hopes to debunk. It progressively becomes clear that their stories link in multiple ways with the Briggs family of Marion, Massachusetts, many of whom died at sea. Characterization is first-rate, as is the historical sensibility. Subtle undercurrents of impending tragedy create a disquieting effect throughout, a fitting atmosphere for a work about a society preoccupied with making contact with deceased loved ones. The scenes of maritime disasters are realistically terrifying. A haunting, if sometimes slowly paced, speculative look at a long-unsolved maritime mystery and the unsettling relationships between writers and their subjects.--Johnson, Sarah Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ON DEC. 4, 1872, the brigantine Mary Celeste was discovered abandoned, adrift in the North Atlantic near the Azores. The ship was empty and its crew missing, although its cargo and provisions were intact, as were the crew's possessions. The weather was calm and the ship was seaworthy, but no trace of the crew-or of the captain's wife and 2-year-old child - was ever found. Newspapers around the world carried the story, and it inspired one of Arthur Conan Doyle's first published pieces of fiction, "J. Habakuk Jephson's Statement," printed anonymously in the British journal Cornhill. From then until the present, dozens of other investigations, novels, historical accounts, television documentaries and movies have been devoted to what has become the prototypical ghost ship. Given this background, what could Valerie Martin possibly contribute to the story in her new novel? The answer is plenty. "The Ghost of the Mary Celeste" is a sly and masterly historical novel, a page-turner written with intelligence and flair. One way of constructing a novel that makes the whole seem larger than its parts is to variegate the parts - to employ multiple voices, styles and points of view, even interpolated genres, from poetry and court records to newspaper clippings, letters and diaries. Martin does all this and more, and the effect is striking. Her book becomes an omnium-gatherum, a mix-and-match scrapbook of journals, documents, narrative bridges and stories within stories. The result is a novel that feels both more and less real than a conventionally written work of fiction - more because of its historical provenance, less because we experience the story as if through shattered glass whose fragments can't be pieced back together. Less, too, because one of its themes is duplicity, and there are suggestions that some of the "documents" aren't genuine. Martin's novel is a work of fiction but it's about fiction, too, which is why Conan Doyle is an important minor character. When he wrote about the Mary Celeste, he got a lot of things wrong. But what's "wrong" in fiction? When inventions are secreted inside a larger invention, do they multiply the lies? Or do they magnify the truth that they're fiction? Martin's novel, with its cacophony of points of view and its sometimes contradictory personal accounts, stirs up uncertainties - these accounts could be hoaxes. Through her ingenious weaving of fiction and fact, she both "solves" the mystery and (as one of her characters says) deepens it. "The Ghost of the Mary Celeste" is also about late-19th-century spiritualism. A ghost story as well as a serious and sometimes comic inquiry into the existence of ghosts, it opens with a vivid account of a shipwreck in which the captain and his wife are lost overboard. In Massachusetts, the wife's 13-year-old cousin claims to have seen the dead woman's ghost, prompting her father, a minister, to grow concerned about his daughter's "spookism." "It's this insalubrious craze for talking to spirits," he complains. "It's loose in the world." This craze becomes a linking thread as the novel turns corner after corner, confounding our expectations while leading us on. There are more corners to turn than in the Pentagon, but the persistent conjuring of ghosts - or are they hallucinations created by psychic trauma? - becomes the novel's keel. I should add that the body count is high, producing an abundant supply of apparitions, all lost at sea. And the sea is virtually a character itself, inherently dangerous and indifferent: "We are nothing to it." As with "MobyDick," we can't help thinking that in the 19th century the malignancy of the oceans was inseparable from their indifference. In a novel that repeatedly exposes its own artifice, this image of the sea becomes an irreducible reality, underpinning all the imaginings. The 13-year-old cousin surfaces later in the novel as a celebrated psychic, now calling herself Violet Petra, described in a memoir written by Phoebe Grant, who introduces herself (with a jab at Henry James) as "that risible hobgoblin of the contemporary male novelist's imagination: the female journalist." Her specialty is the exposure of frauds. Amid the shifting points of view in "The Ghost of the Mary Celeste," Phoebe Grant's may be the strongest. She's a quick-witted skeptic, and the battle of ideas between her and Violet (which actually results in a friendship) is at the novel's heart. Readers may wonder what this centrifugal book, with its changing versions of reality, is finally about. It's about Violet Petra and what she represents: the notion that life is continuous after death and spirits live among us. But it's also about the opposite, as expressed by Phoebe, who has this to say about Violet and her kind: "The spirits they peddled had no mystery; they were ghosts stripped of their otherness. In their cosmography, the dead were just like us and they were everywhere, waiting to give us yet more unsolicited advice." "The test of a first-rate intelligence," F. Scott Fitzgerald once remarked, "is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." The opposing ideas here, taking shape in Phoebe and Violet, come together in the novel's climactic passages, where some actual and chilling ghosts do appear. Whether they're "real" or not is up to the reader. I would say they're "real" in the fiction: They act appropriately to dramatize an intellectual conflict that is also deeply personal. "Voice" in fiction is language plus character, but character in the broadest sense - not just individual personality and psychology but the character of a region, class or historical period. Voice can be an exaggerated caricature; take a look at the early-20th-century American naturalists and the grotesque rendering of immigrant speech in novels like Frank Norris's "The Octopus." At the other extreme, a voice can be bland and flat, entirely lacking in character. As she moves from narrator to narrator, Martin modulates their voices in subtle but convincing ways, from the ingenuous and proper but emotionally engaging journal of a young mid-19th-century woman to Phoebe Grant's caustic irony to a close third-person narrator inflected by Conan Doyle's quaint deductions and imperial robustness. Martin's light touch serves her well. In a novel this replete, the novelist herself becomes a kind of familiar spirit who sees everything at once and finds a common tongue in these disparate voices. At times she even gently mocks her subjects, as when a mysterious femme fatale knocks on Conan Doyle's door and is described with a nearly sculptural touch, including telling details that beg to be deciphered. This woman then launches the creator of Sherlock Holmes across London through a maze of clues and coded messages that lead him to the Mary Celeste's log. This is a novel full of questions. What happened on the Mary Celeste? Is Violet Petra a genuine psychic or a fraud? Are terrible losses God's will or pure chance? Valerie Martin never sacrifices the richness of her novel for easy answers. She's more interested in the questions. And so, then, are we. JOHN VERNON is the author of 11 books, including six novels. He teaches in the creative writing program at Binghamton University.
Guardian Review
On 4 December 1872, a merchant brigantine called the Mary Celeste, out of New York and headed for Genoa, was found drifting in the Atlantic off Portugal, under full sail but apparently abandoned. Of her crew, including her master Benjamin Briggs, his wife Sallie and their two-year-old daughter Sophia, there was no sign, although all the possessions of those on board seemed to be in place, along with enough food and fresh water for six months; her cargo was intact. For more than a century, the legend of the Mary Celeste has fascinated us. There have been theories, wild and considered, attributing her fate variously to undersea earthquakes, sea monsters, methanol fumes and insurance fraud, but most of all she has attracted storytellers. The iconic image of the ghost ship, looming empty out of the Atlantic fogs and sailing on to eternity unmanned, has been taken up by generations of writers, from the anonymous authors of Edwardian penny dreadfuls to Stephen King. One of the first of these, and most instrumental in fixing the mystery in the public imagination, was Arthur Conan Doyle. As a fledgling writer, the future creator of Sherlock Holmes published his own fictionalised account in the Cornhill magazine in 1884 under the name J Habakuk Jephson. He drew heavily on fact but included significant errors that have since accreted to the myth, not least in calling the ship the Marie, rather than Mary, Celeste. A template for the locked-room mystery that was to become Conan Doyle's own trademark, the breathtaking inexplicability of the Mary Celeste's fate is the key to its fascination: it has acted as a blank sheet for lurid fantasy, swashbuckling adventure and elaborate theorising. However, prizewinning American novelist Valerie Martin has employed it for a novel of an altogether more nourishing sort - which will come as no surprise to those familiar with her subtle and psychologically potent historical fictions. Despite the nod to the supernatural in her title, Martin swerves a century of speculation and melodrama in favour of immersing herself in the real lives of those involved, and conjuring up their long-lost world. The daughter of a sea captain herself, she begins not with Conan Doyle, nor with the Mary Celeste's master Benjamin Briggs, but with a heartstopping account of the death of Briggs's aunt, Maria Gibbs, drowned in 1859 with her husband off Cape Fear following a collision at sea. From here, Martin steps into the life of Briggs's brisk, optimistic wife-to-be Sallie, whose sister Hannah, haunted by Gibbs's death, has taken on responsibility for the orphaned son Maria left behind. Increasingly unbalanced, she seeks communication with his mother from beyond the grave. Thence the reader is drawn into a succession of narratives, at times apparently unconnected but circling the central mystery. These range from newspaper reports and consular cables regarding the Mary Celeste's fate to Conan Doyle's account of a steamer trip to Africa and the investigations of Phoebe Grant, a rigorously rational spinster journalist who is on the trail of a medium called Violet Petra. Holding court at a spiritualist summer camp, Petra has a particular sensitivity to the story of the Mary Celeste and may, Grant gradually comes to understand, hold in her possession clues, if not a solution, to its puzzle. Without ever being told that we are drawing nearer to a central horror, the centrifugal tug of these accounts intensifies page by page: the final section purports to be the log of the Mary Celeste itself, which will be delivered into Conan Doyle's own hands. "Was it simply another hoax," Conan Doyle asks himself, "the desperate ploy of a poor, ambitious young writer, just as he had been, who schemed, just as he had schemed, to captivate the fickle attention of the public?" As the accounts - bona fide and otherwise - build towards revelation, we are drawn into an interrogation of both the dangerous seductiveness and higher purposes of fiction, even as we are held captive by Martin's skill as a storyteller. Each character springs to life as she gently reveals their flaws, from the tender, sexually intoxicated young sea-captain's wife to tetchy, sentimental, male chauvinist Conan Doyle. The most vivid and tangible member of a wide cast is the sea itself, a constant, dark, murmuring presence that holds them all in terrified thrall. There may still be readers who expect a definitive solution to this puzzle along with their story, but what Martin provides is more rewarding: along with a satisfying ghost story, she gives us the soil from which its central mystery grew. This is a perilous, oppressive world in which women spend months confined in cabins and parlours, waiting for terrible news, or battened in their husbands' quarters; where ships go down with all hands in far-flung seas in the blink of an eye. It is the death-obsessed society of the Victorians, with their bombazine and mourning brooches and seances, a culture that found its apogee in Tennyson's outpouring of grief and despair, In Memoriam, here quoted by Martin. Her great creation, the restless, unfathomable sea that swallows the Mary Celeste's crew whole, allows us to draw a line direct from Tennyson's "Nature red in tooth and claw" to the oceanic darkness foreseen by Conrad, emblematic of the chaos of the new century to come, where belief will be sacrificed to stern rationalism. Without for a moment losing her grip on her story, in a masterpiece of fine detail and intense reimagining, Martin evokes a world suspended between faith and reason, in which "the other side" is quite real - and always beckoning. Christobel Kent's latest book is A Darkness Descending. To order The Ghost of the Mary Celeste for pounds 14.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Christobel Kent There may still be readers who expect a definitive solution to this puzzle along with their story, but what [Valerie Martin] provides is more rewarding: along with a satisfying ghost story, she gives us the soil from which its central mystery grew. This is a perilous, oppressive world in which women spend months confined in cabins and parlours, waiting for terrible news, or battened in their husbands' quarters; where ships go down with all hands in far-flung seas in the blink of an eye. It is the death-obsessed society of the Victorians, with their bombazine and mourning brooches and seances, a culture that found its apogee in Tennyson's outpouring of grief and despair, In Memoriam, here quoted by Martin. Her great creation, the restless, unfathomable sea that swallows the [Mary Celeste]'s crew whole, allows us to draw a line direct from Tennyson's "Nature red in tooth and claw" to the oceanic darkness foreseen by Conrad, emblematic of the chaos of the new century to come, where belief will be sacrificed to stern rationalism. Without for a moment losing her grip on her story, in a masterpiece of fine detail and intense reimagining, Martin evokes a world suspended between faith and reason, in which "the other side" is quite real - and always beckoning. - Christobel Kent.
Kirkus Review
Martin (The Confessions of Edward Day, 2009, etc.) offers a complex, imaginative version of historical fiction, playing literary hide-and-seek with the unsolved mystery surrounding an American cargo vessel found abandoned in the Azores in 1872. Martin follows a linear chronology. In 1860, Benjamin Briggs, who will become the Mary Celeste's captain, courts his cousin Sallie Cobb, somewhat to the chagrin of her younger sister Hannah, a spiritual rebel who drifts into reveries during which she has visions. In 1872, the ship is found seaworthy but abandoned, with no sign of the crew, the captain, or his wife and infant daughter, who accompanied him on the voyage. In 1884, Arthur Conan Doyle, a young doctor and aspiring author, writes a fictional (and racist) solution to the mystery of what happened to the Mary Celeste that is heavily colored by his own less than happy trip to Africa three years earlier. The story, which captures the public's imagination and launches his career, is assumed factual by many but not by Philadelphia medium Violet Petra, who readers will immediately realize is Hannah Cobb, who long ago ran away from home and assumed a new identity. Violet is being dogged by reporter Phoebe Grant, who initially wants to expose Violet as a Spiritualist fraud but finds the young woman more victim than victimizer. On an American tour in 1894, the now famous Conan Doyle meets Petra, and she impresses him with a message from his long-dead father. He invites her to London. She disappears en route but not before giving Phoebe a document that only complicates the mystery of what happened to the Mary Celeste. And really, that mystery is the least compelling element of a novel that sheds unromantic but not unsympathetic light on 19th-century New-Age spirituality and feminism while beaming a less sympathetic focus on brilliant but highly unlikable Conan Doyle. It is Violet, the lost soul, whom readers will not be able to forget. Martin has wound the disparate threads of her novel into a haunting personal drama.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Martin's (The Confessions of Edward Day) evocative historical novel covers events leading up to, flowing past, and swirling around the enduring mystery of the "ghost ship" Mary Celeste, which was found adrift without a crew in 1872 off the Azores. Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a short story positing about the fate of the ship, the publication of which led to a confrontation between a medium and a reporter. Martin's work explores the world of spiritualism and standards of truth and fiction. Narrator Susie Berneis navigates safely through the many characters and points of view. -VERDICT A great choice for historical fiction collections. ["Martin's seafaring story contains history, suspense, and heartbreak in equal measure as it slowly builds to an enigmatic conclusion. Highly recommended for all readers who appreciate quality historical fiction," read the starred review of the Nan A. Talese: Doubleday hc, LJ 10/15/13.]-Kristen L. Smith, Loras Coll. Lib., Dubuque, IA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Excerpted from the Hardcover Edition A Disaster at Sea The Brig Early Dawn Off the Coast of Cape Fear, 1859 The captain and his wife were asleep in each other's arms. She, new to the watery world, slept lightly; her husband, seasoned and driven to exhaustion the last two days and nights by the perils of a gale that shipped sea after sea over the bow of his heavily loaded vessel, had plunged into a slumber as profound as the now tranquil ocean beneath him. As his wife turned in her sleep, wrapping her arm loosely about his waist and resting her cheek against the warm flesh of his shoulder, in some half-conscious chamber of her dreaming brain she heard the ship's clock strike six bells. The cook would be stirring, the night watch rubbing their eyes and turning their noses toward the forecastle, testing the air for the first scent of their morning coffee. For four days the captain's wife had hardly seen the sky, not since the chilly morning when their ship, the Early Dawn, set sail from Nantasket Roads. Wrapped in her woolen cloak, she had stood on the deck peering up at the men clambering in the rigging, confident as boys at play, though a few among them were not young. The towboat turned the prow into the wind and the mate called out, "Stand by for a starboard tack." A sailor released the towline, and as the tug pulled away, the ship creaked, heeling over lightly, and the captain's wife steadied herself by bending her knees. Then, with a thrill she had not anticipated, she watched as one by one the enormous sails unfurled, high up, fore and aft. A shout went up among the men, so cheerful it made her smile, and for a moment she almost felt a part of the uproarious bustle. We are under way, she thought--that was what they called setting out. A line from a poem she loved crossed her thoughts, "And I the while, the sole, unbusy thing." Her smile faded. She had left her little son, Natie, with her mother and now she felt, like a blow, his absence. How had she been persuaded to leave him behind? In the year since their son's birth, the captain's wife had not passed two consecutive months in her husband's company and she was sick of missing him, of writing letters that might never find him, of following his progress on a map. Her mother had urged her to go. Her father, another captain, retired now, home for the duration, avowed that he would have his grandson riding the pony by the time she returned. Her mother offered reassuring stories of her own first trip as the captain's wife, long years ago, and of the wonders she had seen on the voyage to Callao and the Chincha Islands. "There's nothing like the open deck on a warm, calm night at sea," she said. "The vastness of the heavens, the sense of being truly in God's hand." And her father chimed in with the time-honored chestnut, "There are no atheists at sea." The captain's wife lowered her hood and turned to gaze at her husband, who stood nearby, his legs apart, his face lifted, his eyes roving the stretched canvas, which talked to him about the wind. He was a young man, but he had been at sea since he was scarcely more than a boy and had about him an older man's gravity. His dark eyes, accustomed to taking in much at a glance, were piercing. He was lean, strong, and steady. His frown could stop a conversation; his laughter lifted the spirits of all who heard him. After his first visit to the rambling house they called Rose Cottage, her father had announced, "Joseph Gibbs is as solid a seaman as I know. He keeps his wits about him." And now he kept his wife about him. She studied the sailors, absorbed in their labors, each one different from the others, one skittish, one bullying, another diffident, a shirker, a bawler, a rapscallion, and a fool, yet each at his task harkened to the voice of the Master. Doubtless her mother was right--they were all of them in God's hands, but should the Almighty turn away for a moment, every soul on this ship would shift his faith to the person of Captain Joseph Gibbs. "I'm going below," she said to him, and his eyes lowered and settled upon her. He smiled, nodded, turned to speak to the mate who was striding briskly toward them. Clutching the ladder rails, she backed down into the companionway, where she paused a moment, patting down her hair, before entering the cabin. There was, of course, no one there. For an hour she busied herself with sewing, for another in reading a volume of poems. The ship moved around her, above, beneath, rising and settling, picking up speed. A sensation of nausea, no more than a twinge at first, gradually announced its claim on her attention. She stood up, dropping the book on the couch, anxiously looking about the neat little room. She spied a pot hanging from a hook near the table. As she staggered to it, her stomach turned menacingly, and no sooner had she taken up the vessel than she emptied her breakfast into it. "Oh Lord," she said, pulling out her handkerchief to wipe the perspiration from her brow. She carried the pot through to the cabin and poured the noxious contents into the bucket, then closed the lid and sat down upon it. The sailors, when so afflicted, had the option of vomiting over the side, but it wouldn't do for the captain's wife, who wasn't allowed anywhere near the main deck on her own. She pressed the handkerchief to her lips. Another eruption threatened. Best not stray far from this place, she counseled herself. She wondered how long it would last. It lasted three days, but during that time her stomach was the least of her problems. When at last the captain descended to find his wife flat on her back in the bunk, fully clothed, with a wet cloth draped across her forehead, it was to tell her that he didn't like the look of the western sky. For another hour she slept fitfully and woke to hear the officers talking in the wardroom. Her husband came in to ask if she wouldn't have a cup of tea, which she declined. The ship was pitching bow to stern and he held on to the bedframe as he bent over to press his cool hand against her cheek. "My poor darling," he said. "You're pea-green. What a way to begin your maiden voyage." At the word "maiden," she smiled; it was a joke between them. "Don't worry about me," she said. There was a shout from the deck, a clatter of boots in the companionway. The captain made for the door. "Here it comes," he announced as he went out. It was a squall out of the northwest, which shifted to the southwest and blew a hard gale for eighteen hours. A jib and a topgallant were carried away, as well as a rooster, last seen wings outspread riding backward on a blast of spray. Gradually the wind abated, though the sea was still high, kneading the ship like bread dough between the waves. The captain's wife didn't witness the storm. When it seemed the bunk was determined to dump her on the carpet, she turned on her side, gripping the frame. All she could hear was the wind howling, the timbers creaking, and the men shouting. At last it grew calmer; she lifted her head and glanced about the cabin. Her small collection of books had been scattered widely, as if an impatient reader, pacing the carpet in search of some vital information, had thrown down volume after volume. There was a knock at the door and to her query "Who is it?" the nasal voice of the steward Ah-Sam replied, "Mrs. Gibbs. I have tea for you." She scrambled from the bed, relieved to find, as she sat on the chest next to her empty bookshelf, that her stomach, though decidedly tender, was calm. "Come in," she said. Cautiously, his head bowed and his legs wide apart to keep himself steady, Ah-Sam came in holding a mug between his hands. "This beef tea," he said. "Good for stomach." She reached out, taking the cup, but before she had time to speak, the man had backed out the door. "Thank you," she said, as the latch clicked behind him. The broth was dark, clear, fragrant, revitalizing. She sipped it, swaying lightly as the ship swayed, and planned her next appearance above deck. But by the time she had washed and changed her clothes, the wind had turned to the east, the heavens crackled with lightning, the rain came on in torrents, and darkness closed over the ship like an ebony lid. The captain, his face gray with exhaustion and care, descended to invite his wife to the wardroom, where he and his first officer sat down to a hurried meal. Ah-Sam rushed in with the coffeepot and a slab of hard cheese wrapped in a cloth, and then disappeared in his self-effacing fashion. The captain's wife poured out the coffee, declining the mate's offering of tinned meat and soft tack. "Ah-Sam brought me some lovely broth," she told her husband. "Did you tell him to do that?" "I just told him you were green," he said. "He knows everything there is to know about seasickness." "Well, he must, for he has cured me," she agreed. When the men were gone, the captain's wife sat at the table for some time, listening to the fury of the storm and comparing the sensation of being in a ship to that of lying in her bed at home on a tempestuous night. No wonder the sailors were sometimes so contemptuous of landsmen. As the night wore on, she persuaded herself that it was only a matter of time before the storm must abate and she might as well go to bed, as it was impossible to hold a needle, or a pencil, or even a book. She undressed and crawled back into the bunk. After what seemed a long time, but was barely an hour, she slipped into a dreamless sleep. When she awoke, the room was dark and to her surprise her husband lay by her side, one arm draped across her waist, sleeping soundly. She moved close to him and kissed his cheek. His hand strayed to her thigh, grasped the flesh just above her knee, and pulled her leg over his hip. He whispered her name, nuzzling his mouth against her breasts. The noise of the ship was hushed; the violent pitching and rolling had resolved to a soporific churning that made her think of a child, her child, rocking in his cradle. He was too big for that now. She wandered into sleep again. Her husband turned over and she did too, so that she faced his back. Now, distantly she heard the clock strike six bells. She opened her eyes to find the room bathed in a shimmering aqueous light. The storm had passed. She was wide awake, brimming with vitality, but she didn't move, unwilling to disturb her husband, who had slept so little and had only an hour before he must take up his duties again. She pressed her lips against his back; her drifting thoughts settled on breakfast. Brown bread, plum jam--she'd brought seven jars on board herself--and butter. Oat porridge, hot coffee with heavy cream. I'm starving, she thought, amused by that. How good to be safe, warm, hungry, alive. Her husband groaned in his sleep and a shudder ran down his spine. "Are you awake?" he asked softly. "I am," she said. "You've got another hour. Go back to sleep." She eased her leg from his hip as he turned heavily to face her. "No," he said. "I'll get up." They were washed and dressed when the steward arrived with the coffeepot, the porridge, and the bread. The captain went on deck to look at his ship, his crew, the sky, and the sea. When he returned she had the table laid with bread, the leftover cheese, her homemade jam and butter, the pot of coffee, the cream, and the squat ewer of porridge wrapped in a towel. "Is all well?" she asked as she poured his coffee, resting her fingers on his neck before turning to her own cup. "For the present," he said. "It's squally to the southeast and we're headed for it." "Can't we stop?" she asked. He smiled at his wife's naïveté, then, sensing that she spoke in jest, turned and swatted her skirt with the back of his hand. "No, miss. We can't stop. It's not a horse you're riding." "I want to get out of this cabin," she said. "I'm dying for fresh air." The captain went up first, while his wife put on her cloak and laced her boots. She passed through the wardroom to the hatch, humming to herself, curious to see how the ship would look now, how the sea would look, as they skimmed across it. As she stepped onto the deck, a blast of frigid air blocked her so forcefully she stumbled back, clinging to the ladder rail. Her husband strode toward the mainmast, in conversation with the mate, who gesticulated at something going on in the bow. A wet, white mist, mingling in the sails, obscured her view. She pulled her hood in close, took a few steps from the hatch, and there it was, the sight she had long imagined--at once she lamented the paucity of her imagination--the sea. Slate-blue peaks studded with white foamy caps, line after line, each wave preceded by another and every one followed by another, as wide as the world was wide, and above it the sky, which was white, flat, and cold, the sun a brighter patch hovering in the distance. There was no visible horizon. She turned to face the bow and there she saw a different sky, the one that worried her husband, a rolling gray above and black below with a band of sickish yellow in between. She couldn't tell how far off it was, but sky and sea appeared all one, moving rapidly, like a wall of lead, toward the ship. She breathed in the chilly, salt-laden air, gazing up at the sailors who were occupied in shortening sail. When she looked back at the deck, her eyes were drawn to a man crouched behind the main hatch, his hands resting on his thighs, his face turned up to her, his eyes narrowed, as if trying to draw a bead on a target. His beard and hair were all black and wild, as were his eyes. In a sudden grimace, he bared a line of fierce white teeth. The captain's wife stepped back, unnerved, conscious of her accelerating heart rate and a cautionary weakness in her knees. She looked aft, where the helmsman gripped the wheel, his attention fixed on the binnacle. The mist obscured his face. The sea was scarcely visible but made its disposition known; as the hull shifted, the starboard side dropped down and a mass of water rose up, clubbing the side. A tremor of anxiety scuttled up her neck and she felt her upper teeth pressing into her lower lip. There was a new sound, a chugging, pulsing sound, rhythmical and increasing in volume, but she couldn't tell which direction it came from. Was it belowdecks, or in the dark water below that? Excerpted from The Ghost of the Mary Celeste by Valerie Martin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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