Page 36 of Under the Stars

An Account of the Sinking of the Steamship Atlantic, by Providence Dare (excerpt)

Long Island Sound

( four and a half hours before the Atlantic runs aground )

I stared at the outline of Starkweather’s head against the lantern. “What hour is it?” I rasped. Over the roar of the storm, I could scarcely hear my own voice.

“Close to midnight, I think. You had a spell in the main saloon.”

“And you brought me here? To your stateroom?”

He shrugged. “The doctor said you should be kept as quiet as possible.”

I raised my hand and saw that it was now properly bandaged. Underneath all the snowy linen, my flesh throbbed, but not so badly as before. “Laudanum,” I mumbled.

“The doctor insisted.”

“How many drops?”

“Only three. We may strike at any moment, God knows, and you’ll need your wits about you when the hour arrives. Are you thirsty?”

I nodded. The laudanum had dulled my fear—had dulled even my dislike of this man. I watched him rise and leave the room. A moment later, he returned with a glass of water. I struggled to sit and sip from the glass.

“Where are you from, Mr. Starkweather?”

“My people are from Marblehead,” he said. “My father captained a whaleship. He was lost at sea when I was about twelve.”

“Your poor mother.”

“She died some time ago. A wasting sickness.”

“Do you have any other family? Anyone to mourn you?”

He looked at his hands, which still held the water. “I have a sister in Marblehead. Married, with five children.”

“And you, Mr. Starkweather? Why aren’t you married?”

He raised his head. I thought he smiled. “With a face like this, Miss Dare?”

“It’s not so bad, once you get used to it.”

He handed me the glass again, and I finished the water.

Strange how the endless lurch of the ship, the cacophony of the storm on the other side of this wooden wall, had receded to the far edge of my notice.

They say human beings can accustom themselves to anything, even the simian features of Mr. Starkweather.

I remember how it seemed to me that these waves would carry us forever, that the end would never come.

This strange companionship with a man who was my mortal enemy.

Who had seen my most intimate self, the evidence of my wickedness, on the canvases that Mr. Irving had hidden in his studio, in case his children should call unexpectedly.

He studied his hand, palm down on his thigh. “I was married, once. A long time ago.”

“You must have been very young.”

“I was nineteen. She was the daughter of a whaling captain, a friend of my father’s. A dear and gentle girl. We had known each other since infancy. She died in childbed a year later.”

His voice caught on the word childbed .

“Did the babe live?” I asked.

“No.” He looked up. His cheek gleamed wet in the glow of the lantern. “There is something I must ask you, Miss Dare. In case we should shortly die.”

“What’s that?”

“Was it Maurice Irving who warned you of the warrant?”

I couldn’t speak.

He nodded. “Yes. I thought I might try him, to see what he would do.”

I leaned back against the wall. My thoughts groped their way through the peculiar fog of laudanum and exhaustion.

I could not quite see Maurice’s face in my mind, as we stood in the back garden of Josephine’s house, but I remembered how pale he was, how miserable, how thin.

I heard his anguished voice— You must flee, Pru. I have some money laid by.

“He was my dearest friend,” I said. “My companion.”

“Yes. And what did he know of your intimacy with his father?”

I closed my eyes. “You have led an exemplary life. You wouldn’t understand what it is to be drawn into a—a state of being that—”

“Did you love him?”

“I don’t know if it was love. It wasn’t the kind of love you read about in novels—some tender affliction that ends in marriage. It was—I can’t describe—a kind of hunger—a hunger that—that—well, never mind. It’s not something a man like you could even comprehend.”

“I comprehend more than you imagine,” said Starkweather.

I couldn’t seem to put my thoughts in order. To be under the effect of laudanum is to feel as if you’re awake in the middle of a dream. Starkweather a figure in this dream, himself and yet somebody else—a priest to whom I was confessing.

And we were soon to die. And there was nobody else to tell.

“I never meant to do it,” I said. “But I saw what he needed—what he craved from me—and I couldn’t deny it to him.

You might say that I loved him. I would say it was something else—something more but also something less.

Whatever it was, I knew I was entering into sin—into such sin from which God alone could redeem me.

I knew and I did it anyway. I gave him what he craved. ”

“He was a beast,” Starkweather said fiercely. “A beast to take it from you.”

“Yes, he was a beast. But so was I. I wanted it too—had wanted it for some time. He wouldn’t have taken me if I had climbed to my feet and walked away.

Of that, I’m sure. But he saw in my face that I had capitulated.

He saw what I was—a sinner, like him. A carnal thing, irredeemable.

It was I who reached for him, that first time.

In the spring after Mrs. Irving’s accident.

A fine May morning. He had me right there on the floor of his studio.

I think he tried to be gentle, but it was brutal.

Short and brutal. I didn’t care. I wanted it that way—I wanted it done, finished.

I wanted him to breach me, to ruin me so I couldn’t turn back.

Call me what you will, I don’t care. I still feel him on my skin.

Do you hear me? In my own head, I hear the howl he made at the end.

Like an animal struck by a mortal blow—as if the rapture itself was an agony to him.

On and on. When he was done, he fell upon me and began to weep.

It was the strangest thing. I held him sobbing in my arms while he poured out his terrible remorse.

I don’t know how long we lay there. The whole world lay still around us, the hours and minutes, the sun in the sky.

Then he rose. He told me not to move, as if I could have moved.

He took out his sketchbook and began to draw me, right there, as I lay sprawled on his rug with his remains still inside me.

He said he wanted to capture the exact moment of human carnality, the very essence of nature.

He was half-mad, I think. When he had finished drawing, he wanted me again.

I couldn’t refuse him; he was impossible to refuse.

He had a force of persuasion that overcame reason.

He would wake me in the night with some new idea that consumed him; he had these mirrors put everywhere, so he could watch us together from every angle, every aspect, every contortion of which two human bodies were capable; sometimes I feared for my soul and for his, but when I saw what he made, what he created from our union, how could I deny him?

To feed his genius was an act of transubstantiation.

A miracle. To submit myself to that act of creation, to be essential to it—I was intoxicated.

I was enraptured. And so it went for a year.

From me, he drew the impulse to create, the force, the genius that impelled him.

And I woke up each morning and lived for him.

Call that love, if you want. I don’t know what it was.

” I paused for breath. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I’m confessing all this to you. Because we’re going to die, I guess.”

Starkweather didn’t speak. I opened my eyes and turned to him. He sat with his head in his hands, his fingers speared through his hair.

“I have horrified you,” I said. “Revolted you.”

Starkweather lifted his head. “Don’t you think,” he said, in a slow and almost stuttering voice, “don’t you think I already knew this? When I found those paintings in the studio?”

“Then it’s no wonder you went to all this trouble to apprehend me.”

He held up his hands and stared at his palms. “All my life, I’ve longed to paint like that. To extract these thoughts from my head and direct them through my hands, my pencil, my brush, to inhabit some patch of canvas as if they were alive.”

“But you do. Your drawings are remarkable, Mr. Starkweather.”

“They’re copies, nothing more. The imitation of genius.

I have some skill, yes. A draftsman’s skill.

But not a tenth of what Irving had, not the—the immortal spark to give life to what he painted.

God —” He stopped to gather himself. “The Lord Almighty, in his infinite wisdom, lavished his great gifts upon this beast’s head.

Upon Henry Irving’s head. And why ? Why?

God gave him charm and beauty and a singular, towering genius.

A magnificent wife he betrays again and again, in the basest manner.

From his birth, at every stage of his life, the Lord showers him with favor.

And then— then God gives him you . You, Miss Dare, whom he betrays worst of all. ”

“And I tell you that these gifts were a burden to Mr. Irving. A misery. To burn so bright is a curse, believe me. Better by far to be ordinary. To bathe in the warmth of his flame, as I did, even if it scorched me.”

Starkweather laid his hands on his knees and stared at his knuckles. “The Lord giveth and taketh away. We are each of us but an instrument of his will. We live as specks of sand under the stars.”

I gazed at his thick, bony forehead. The cropped hair that covered his massive skull. “Then why persecute me like this? If you despised Mr. Irving so deeply. Why do you care how he died?”

Starkweather lifted a puzzled face to mine. “Because justice is blind, Miss Dare. It doesn’t matter what I think of the man. Every human being is entitled to justice.”

“Mr. Starkweather,” I said softly. “We’re going to die. It no longer matters.”

“But it does matter. Even at this moment. Even when hope is lost. Or else we have all lived in vain.”