Page 57 of Under the Stars

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

Winthrop Island, New York

The trunk arrived two days ago on the fifteenth of April, brought over by Mr. Winthrop’s men from the railroad depot in Stonington.

Not unnaturally, Mr. Winthrop wanted to know what was inside it.

Some clothing, I told him, and a few items of sentimental value.

This was true. He did not press me further.

Mr. Winthrop is a good man, of stoic New England stock, wise enough to avoid those fits of jealousy to which so many husbands are prone.

I don’t deceive myself that he’s in love with me, any more than I tremble with some grand passion for him.

He is long and rather fearfully lean, and he grows a thick beard to warm his face in winter, which he assures me he will shave off again come May.

I suppose I shall then see what he looks like.

For now, his looks are not repulsive to me, which is all I require. My hour for passion is past.

He asked me to marry him only one week after the wreck.

Fresh women are scarce on this island, and he saw his chance—a new widow, facing a fearful future without her husband, already proven fertile and not unbecoming (as he phrased it, when he made his proposal to me).

He also told me he was moved by my tender care of my dying husband—I did not correct this assumption, nor do I imagine he truly believed it—and by my hardiness in surviving the wreck itself.

All told, as promising a prospect for matrimony as he could reasonably hope for.

As for me, I was too numb with grief and shock to care whether I lived or died, was married or was not.

I thought I should probably accept, for the sake of the child that—by some miracle known only to God—still grew in my belly.

We were married a week later. He had already buried one wife, three years earlier, so he knew his business in bed.

He’s clever and dutiful; he likes to read and sometimes exhibits a wry and unexpected humor that lifts even my deadened spirits.

I expect I shall be contented enough in him.

The vital point, however—he doesn’t ask questions.

He is not stupid, as I said, and he could not have failed to wonder that I neither accompanied my husband’s body back to Boston nor offered anything more than vague allusions to my past; or, indeed, how Starkweather and I had come to sail on the Atlantic together in such an unpromising month to begin with.

Long after the other survivors had departed for the mainland, and the bodies had been returned for burial, and the wreck had been picked over and salvaged, and some men had finally managed to lift the ship’s bell from the rock in which it had become lodged and quiet its ceaseless tolling, I remained in Mr. Winthrop’s plain, bleak house on the island that bore his name—tending the fire, preparing meals, feeding the hens and collecting their eggs.

Mr. Winthrop did not ask why this barren and isolated landscape should attract me.

He did not ask why nobody came to inquire after me.

I suppose he thought I had been running away with my lover.

If he did, the state of my morals troubled him not at all.

He is, as I said, a practical man, with a healthy carnal appetite of his own.

It was only after January passed that I began to wake from my fog of despair and turn my attention to the impending arrival of my child.

To give some thought to its future, and to mine, and to all that had passed that had brought me to this island.

To the duty I owed to John Starkweather, who had died for my sake.

It was then I set my pen to paper and began this account you read here.

I then took a fresh sheet of paper—my husband has been kind enough to indulge me in all my little requests—and wrote a letter I addressed to Mr. Maurice Irving of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

—

The last time I saw Maurice, he had come to visit me at his sister Josephine’s house in Quincy, where—you will remember—I had gone to stay after Mr. Irving’s death.

He was flushed, agitated. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in a week, let alone eaten. His coat and his shirt were stained and untidy; his hair unbrushed; his cheeks unshaved. It was evening and Josephine had gone to visit friends. We met in the garden behind the house.

“He told me he’s going to arrest you tomorrow morning, Pru,” he said.

“Who?” I asked, though I knew the man he meant.

“John Starkweather, of course. That damn bloodhound.” Maurice sat on a bench and speared his hands through his hair. “Once he has you in his clutches, it won’t be long before he has the truth out of you.”

“Let him try. I have done nothing wrong.”

He made an angry noise and rose from the bench to resume his pacing. “My own father. To seduce you, to get you with child.”

“He did not force me, Maurice. Never once did he force me.”

“He took the cruelest advantage of you. An innocent girl, half his age.”

“He loved me, Maurice. He needed me. To paint again, even to live.”

“So he told you. Knowing your kind nature. Knowing exactly how to engage your sympathy to serve his own base appetites.”

“It was more than appetite . It was love.”

He turned and cried in anguish, “Is that what he told you? That he loved you?”

“All the time. Every day, every hour.”

“Did he tell you that he had never felt such passion before? That his devotion to you—let me see, Pru, let me get it right—that his devotion was so total as to outstrip the boundaries of reason?”

I stared at him, unable to speak. He began to laugh—a peculiar, mirthless cackle.

“Oh, Pru. Poor, innocent Pru. Did you think you were the first? Don’t you know what he was doing when Mother killed herself—”

“ Killed herself?”

“Think, Pru!”

“It was an accident,” I said. “The candle fell. Or the sealing wax.”

Maurice looked at me with utmost pity. “She knew. She saw him, Pru. You know I was sitting with her when the two of them passed by, on their way up the stairs. She stood and told me she had some letters to write. The last words I ever heard from her. It was not an accident, Pru. He drove her to it. Three girls we sent away. You remember them. He had to pay for them all, poor girls—for the bastards they bore him. That was why he went away on the exhibition tour, because he needed more money. Mother knew, of course she did. She kept the damn accounts. And he knew that she knew. Each time he wept and he swore it was the last. He swore remorse, and then he did it again. He couldn’t help himself.

He blamed himself for Mother’s death. And he was right.

He killed her, as much as if he’d dropped that candle on her dress himself. ”

“This is your imagination, Maurice. Your fevered imagination. I never saw—I never heard—”

“Yes, you did. If you had your eyes open. If you weren’t blinded by adoration, like everybody else.” Maurice took me by the shoulders. “How could you do it, Pru? How could you love him? You knew my mother. You loved her. She treated you like her own child.”

I plucked his hands away. “But I wasn’t her child. I was always a servant in your house, Maurice. I was not one of you. That was clear to me. Only your father saw me as something more.”

“Don’t be stupid. You weren’t special to him, any more than the others. He needed some object of obsession to fire his inspiration, that was all. He couldn’t have loved you. He wasn’t capable of loving anyone except himself.”

“That’s not true. We lay together in love. In love, Maurice. I know that in the innermost chamber of my heart.”

But my words sounded hollow. My brain was awhirl—Mrs. Irving, her skirts aflame, her mortal screams. Mr. Irving’s stricken face. His misery.

His silver hair, shorn like that of a penitent.

Maurice went on as if he hadn’t heard me. “I didn’t believe it. It was too fantastical to be true. That you could fall prey to him. You, of all people, who knew the anguish he caused my mother. When your father told me the truth—”

“My father —”

“—I said he was a lying dog, that it was impossible, that my father would never commit such a sordid crime—”

“What are you saying, Maurice? When did you speak to my father?”

He came down hard on a bench and buried his head in his arms. “I never meant to hurt him. I only meant to save you. My dear friend. My darling Providence, my dearest friend. You were like a sister to me.”

The evening air bit my cheek. I stared at his miserable head while the words sank through my skin, as if from another language. Incomprehensible.

“Save me,” I repeated.

“I only came to know the truth. To demand the truth from him. What your father told me—whether it was true. I never meant—”

“My God,” I said. “My God.”

He raised his head. His eyes were bleak and rimmed with pink. “He admitted it. He said you were his lover, that you were expecting his child. I went mad—I don’t remember—I ran up the stairs to find you—he followed me—”

“No. No.”

“I don’t know what happened, Pru. I swear I don’t. I never meant to hurt him.”

“Oh God, Maurice—”

“He lost his balance. I’m sure I never touched him. He lost his balance and fell, I could swear it. God would have struck me down before I—before I committed such an act—”

“Are you sure of that?” I whispered.

“Starkweather must never know. If he suspects—the two of you—he’ll have it out—the truth—we shall be ruined, Pru, both of us—you will go down as surely as I will— ruined —”

He choked on his own words and buried his head back in his arms. I remember how my ears rang, how my vision blurred.

I collapsed next to him on the bench. I don’t know how long we sat there while he wept and shuddered.

I remember my own eyes remained dry. There were no tears for this.

Nothing at all to express the horror in my soul.

Eventually Maurice rose and stood before me in the darkened garden.

“You must flee, Pru,” he said. “You must flee tonight, before they arrest you. I’ll give you all the money I have. When you find a place, write me a letter by the name of Mary West, and I’ll send you your belongings. Anything you want, Pru. But you must flee tonight. Please.”

“I don’t—I can’t—”

“In time, you’ll see I’m right. He would have discarded you like the others. Once he had sucked the last drop of inspiration from you to breathe life into his own genius—once you were no use to him. Don’t you see? You have a chance to begin anew. Go, Pru. Save yourself.”

I remember how I heard his words and thought, Save myself? Or save you? In the end, it was all the same. Maurice was right. The truth would destroy us both. And would he not already suffer all his days for what he had done, in avenging his mother’s death?

Better to flee. Better to start over in a new land and leave all judgment in God’s hands.

Except for this. John Starkweather is now dead because I gazed at Maurice’s pleading face in that midnight Quincy garden and I had not the courage to refuse him.

For that sin, and that alone, I will repent the rest of my days.

—

True to his promise, Maurice sent me everything I asked for. My remaining clothes, my few mementos, some books I could not live without.

And, nestled carefully among these objects, nine rolls of canvas on which Henry Irving brought his obsession for me into vivid and mesmerizing life. When I lifted them to my face, I could still smell the faint odor of paint, the scent of our hours together.

Only the final unfinished portrait is missing. I can only assume that Maurice destroyed it.

—

For now, I can write no more. The pains that began seizing my womb this morning have grown stronger and more frequent, so that I can think of little else but the ordeal to come.

By dinnertime tomorrow, if God wills it, Mr. Irving’s child will enter this world—never knowing where he came from, or who his father was.

It will be better so.