Page 19 of Under the Stars
I closed my eyes and thought of the house by the sea where the Irvings often stayed for a month or two during the summer.
Not for them the green mountain air of Lenox or Peterborough!
No, it was the sea air Mr. Irving craved, the infinite reach of the ocean.
In my mind, I saw him setting up his easel at dawn to capture the morning light.
At eight o’clock I would bring him his breakfast. Hot tea with plenty of milk and a slice of bread laid thick with butter.
Most days he would nod his thanks, hardly noticing my presence inside his daze of creation, but every so often he would glance up and smile.
Thank you, Providence.
I opened my eyes and saw Mrs. Walton’s curious face staring into mine. As if some aspect of my person had struck her as familiar, but she couldn’t quite place where she had seen me.
—
The newspapers. How I had loved them once, those incessant messengers from the world around me.
The Irvings took the morning editions of the Courier and the Post (Mr. Irving preferred the Courier ) and the afternoon edition of the Emancipator and Republican .
It was my task to collect them from the front stoop and lay them out on the breakfast table or the tea table.
Hungrily I would watch the family turn the pages as I poured tea or coffee and fetched hot toast. That tuft of soft, fair hair on the back of Mr. Irving’s hand.
The lines of tiny black on the newsprint, as thin and delicate as the wings of a moth.
When the table was cleared, the papers were mine.
I had perhaps half an hour to spare. I learned to read quickly, to devour the paragraphs whole, to stamp the illustrations on my mind.
This rich, infinite world around me, abuzz with human activity!
Feats and foibles braided together! Tragedy and comedy dancing to an eternal music!
And those engravings of the great and the ordinary and the infamous. Stamped on my mind, to be turned over and examined as I went about my daily tasks.
So you can perhaps imagine my feelings when I lifted the afternoon edition of the Boston Post one week ago and recognized my own face—drawn by Mr. Irving’s own hand, though how this sketch came into the editors’ hands I could only guess—beneath a headline that proclaimed IRVING’S MAID QUESTIONED BY DETECTIVES REGARDING HIS UNTIMELY DEATH; SUSPICION FALLS ON SOLE WITNESS TO HIS FATAL MIDNIGHT TUMBLE DOWN STAIRS; WHY DID SHE LIVE ALONE IN HOUSE WITH BEREAVED PAINTER?
Since that shock, I had avoided the sight of any newspaper, except to peruse the advertisements for railroad and steamship connections to New York and beyond.
But the citizens of Boston and its surrounding settlements had gone on reading.
The story of Irving’s shocking death was the talk of the town—indeed, for all I knew, the talk of all New England.
A painter so universally beloved, whose portraits and landscapes had captured the imaginations of all who saw them—to die so violently, so puzzlingly, in a house empty of any friends or family except his young housemaid— his amanuensis, they called me, once further details of our association came to public notice.
Could there be any surprise that his sketch of Providence Dare’s face would be reproduced everywhere, and seen by everybody?
I met Mrs. Walton’s curious gaze for an instant, offered her a vague smile, and rose from the sofa as if in search of news or comfort.
—
Sometime before noon, the cry went up again.
After leaving the main saloon, I had first retired to my berth, but every time I closed my eyes I felt that the damask curtain was smothering me—in my imagination, the ship was breaking up, sinking, water filling the space around me, but so entangled were my limbs in this curtain that I couldn’t move a muscle, could not lift my head above the cold rising water, so it filled my lungs instead.
I sat up panting, wrapped the blanket around my shoulders, and stole upstairs to the grand saloon.
A couple of men sat in a pair of armchairs, drinking sherry out of cut glass.
They paid me no attention as I settled on a sofa at the other end of the room.
We might have occupied the lounge of a fine hotel, except for the bitter cold and the howl of the storm and the way the floor tilted and bucked beneath the furniture.
We must have felt rather than heard the stir of excitement.
You couldn’t hear any particular noise in the center of that racket.
I lifted my head and saw some movement on the promenade deck at the stern of the ship.
A steward hurried by. I stopped him and asked if it was another ship, and he said yes, it was the Mohegan out of New York, should have touched New London at three o’clock in the morning—our sister ship, he went on, working the alternate schedule for the Norwich and Worcester line.
The men had risen from their chairs. Ah yes, of course, said one.
Van Pelt commanded the Mohegan . Great friends, they were, Dustan and Van Pelt, running back and forth along Long Island Sound these many years, upon various vessels.
Van Pelt would surely put his ship to the rescue of his old pal Dustan.
I wrapped my blanket around my shoulders and hurried to join the knot of passengers gathering on the promenade deck. Starkweather wasn’t among them.
“I figure that Van Pelt fellow might pass a cable,” said one man, near my elbow. “Tow us into New London.”
“He’d burst his own boiler, then,” somebody replied.
“Or send down an anchor. One more anchor would hold us, all right.”
“And how’s he going to do that?”
“I dunno. Fix the cable to a buoy and float it toward us.”
“For Christ’s sake, man. In this sea?”
A blast of wind suffocated any reply to that. By now my ears were so accustomed to the constant howling, the crash of waves, I couldn’t remember what silence was like. I could remember every detail of every quiet moment of my life, but not the quiet itself.
I glanced over my shoulder to the door into the upper saloon, then to the Mohegan as she dove like a porpoise from wave to wave. Just like the New Haven had, I thought—poking her nose into the open sea, only to scurry back to harbor.
I couldn’t see the wheelhouse from here, tucked beneath the awning of the aft promenade deck. But I could picture the stern face of Captain Dustan as he watched his old friend Van Pelt tear through this deadly sea, bearing his own cargo of human souls.
I couldn’t see the distress signal, either.
But I could see the Mohegan lurch closer, could see the froth spew from its wheels.
Could imagine what would happen if that ship attempted to come alongside ours—to lower its boats, to board a hundred souls into them, to bring them safely over her own side.
There was not a chance of success. Not the slightest hope.
I thrust away from the railing and turned for the saloon. The deck yawed beneath me. A wave crashed into the side of the ship, sending a tongue of spray across the deck to lash my side. I lurched to the doorway as the door itself burst open.
“Miss Dare!”
“Congratulations, Mr. Starkweather!” I shouted, over the noise of the wind. “It looks as if you’ll be serving your warrant on the bottom of the sea.”