Page 7 of Under the Stars

I shut my eyes. Not that it made much difference—darkness either way, except that now I heard every sound.

I saw through my ears. All the passengers talked at once— question of whether the anchors hold, isn’t it—damn fool—can’t blame him, when it’s those gentlemen who insisted—God’s sake, don’t panic—gone to fetch the poor man up from the engine room—abate by morning, surely—going to sink, that’s obvious, they’re only waiting until —

From behind me, a scream pierced the saloon. I turned in my seat. I couldn’t make out anything through the blackness, but I felt the room stir.

“Make way! Make way!” a man called out. “Ahoy, there! Open up a berth!”

“Who is it? Is it the captain?”

“No, the engineer!”

“Doctor! Do we have a doctor?”

A light appeared—somebody carried a lantern, swinging violently from his hand. Behind him, a couple of men carried a writhing body between them.

“He’s half-burned!”

“My God, his eyes!”

“Oh, I can’t bear it!”

The man howled again. Someone opened the door to a berth; the stretcher party bore him inside. In the glow of the lantern, I saw the man’s legs swung onto the bed. A low, broken, agonized moan floated from the room, underneath all the voices.

“That Navy man’s a doctor!”

“He’s half-dead himself.”

“We need water! Bandages! Where’s that steward?”

“Has anyone here tended a burn? A bad one?”

I braced myself on the arm of the sofa and forced upward this body of mine, this bag of shaking bones. The floor lurched underneath me—I stepped back and caught myself.

“I have,” I called. “I’ve cared for burns.”

—

So far as I was aware, only Mrs. Irving knew for certain how her dress had caught aflame that terrible day—the day that overturned everything.

It was the middle of summer, so the coals lay unlit in their hearths.

When poor Mrs. Newberry burned to death one January evening three or four years previous, Boston had been enduring an especially cold snap and a stray spark from the roaring parlor fire had landed on her skirt.

The flames had swallowed her up before she could make a sound.

Sucked the breath from her lungs, people said.

Mrs. Irving had had a little more time than that, but not much.

She had been sitting at her desk in the small study that overlooked the garden at the back of the house, writing letters.

Whether she dropped the hot sealing wax or the candle itself remained a mystery.

Probably the wax, I surmised afterward, when I could bear to puzzle over the matter.

Probably the wax fell unnoticed on the hem of her skirt and smoked its way alight.

The open fire of a candle would have sent the dress up in flames in an instant, like Mrs. Newberry.

When I heard the screams, I was on my knees before the door of one of the spare bedrooms, peering through the keyhole.

It was that hollow in the center of July where the sun smoldered behind a sheet of haze and the air languished on your skin.

Upstairs, the heat gathered so close that when you drew breath, you felt as if you were drowning.

I still remember how Mr. Irving’s back gleamed like the hide of a slippery white porpoise, bucking across the waves; how Ida made the same soft little grunts as Mrs. Irving’s Persian cat, expectorating a hairball.

You can perhaps imagine how the first distant shriek penetrated such an atmosphere.

As I bolted to my feet, I heard Mr. Irving bark— What the devil?

I ran downstairs carrying the image of their concupiscence behind my eyes, the heat of their lust between my legs, and sometimes this troubles me, when the memory wakes me in the small hours of the night. How my brain was already aflame.

How I sprang into the study to find Maurice beating out the flames from what remained of his mother’s dress, while Mrs. Irving shrieked—no, that’s not the right word—no word exists for the kind of sound Mrs. Irving made, like someone had reached into her throat and pulled out a fistful of noise.

How somebody ran out into the street screaming, Fire! Fire!

How I tended to Mrs. Irving for half an hour until the doctor arrived, because nobody else could bear it—poor Mrs. Irving, whose dress had melted into her skin.

All this, while aflame myself from the sight of the upstairs maid engaged in concourse with Mrs. Irving’s beloved husband—my master, Henry Irving.

—

Now the hour had struck two in the dark of morning at the end of a wintry November, but the scream was the same—is always the same.

Agony beyond the endurance of mortal man.

Inside a berth, two men arranged the injured engineer on the white sheets. A third held the lantern above his head, shedding light upon a pair of streaming eyes, a blistered forehead, flesh like the inside of a ripe strawberry. The engineer thrashed his arms and legs and cried out.

“Cold water and a cloth,” I said. “At once .”

“Steward’s fetching them,” said the man at the foot of the berth.

“You must hold him down. His name?”

“Dobbs, I believe.”

I leaned close. “Mr. Dobbs, can you hear me?”

Dobbs moaned and turned his face toward me. I choked back a gasp.

“Water,” I said. “We must have water.”

A metal bucket clanged to the floor beside me. Water sloshed over the side to drench my stocking feet.

“Here it is, ma’am.”

“Fresh? Not sea?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And linens,” I said. “A washtowel will do.”

Someone handed me a strip of linen. I plunged it into the bucket and squeezed out the water over Dobbs’s face, taking care to avoid his nostrils. “Some canvas under his head,” I said.

Nobody moved, of course. Nobody ever moves.

I looked up to the steward standing next to me, mute with shock at the sight of Mr. Dobbs’s raw face and jellied eyes.

I forced my voice over the cries of Mr. Dobbs that rose and fell in parabolic waves.

“You, sir. Find some canvas to keep the pillow dry.”

The man startled and bolted from the cabin, propelled along by a wave that tilted the deck.

The lantern struck me on the back of the head; I bent to snatch the teetering bucket before it overturned altogether.

Icy water everywhere. A thick arm snagged me by the waist, just in time to save me from sprawling against the cabin wall.

Somehow Mr. Dobbs stuck to the bed, pinned there at the hips by the steadfast fellow at the foot of the bed.

From the door of the cabin, someone exclaimed, “Good God! What’s this?”

The man was slight and pale, braced against the doorframe and engulfed by an overcoat of thick navy wool—the same frail man, I realized, who had boarded the ship before me, a few hours ago.

His reddened eyes squinted at me, gripped still by the man who carried the lantern; then at the man at the foot of the berth, pinning Mr. Dobbs to the sheets.

The ship lurched back and the lantern-bearer released me. I turned away and squeezed out another stream of water along the skin of Mr. Dobbs’s face. “This man has been burned.”

“Yes, I know that. What are you doing to him?”

“Cooling the skin.”

I ducked the cloth back in the water. The newcomer stepped forward to join me at the side of the bunk.

“Dr. Hassler, United States Navy surgeon,” he said. “You have some experience at sickbeds?”

“My mistress was badly burned some years ago. She lingered on nearly a week before she succumbed.”

“I see. Let’s have a look at him, shall we?” Dr. Hassler circled around me to bend over the patient’s face, as another growl of anguish gathered in Dobbs’s throat. Hassler glanced up at the man holding the lantern. “Bring that light over here, will you? Sir?”

The man moved his arm to dangle the lantern over Hassler’s shoulder. The doctor clucked his tongue. “Mr. Dobbs, is it? My name is Hassler. Surgeon, United States Navy. I see that Miss…er, Miss…?”

“West,” I said.

“Miss West has kindly ministered to the burns to your face. I’ve sent for the ship’s medical kit. Once it arrives, we’ll dose you with a drop or two of laudanum for the pain. Help you to sleep as well. Miss West? You’re familiar with the use of laudanum, I hope?”

“Yes,” I said. “Quite familiar.”

—

Ah, laudanum. The alcoholic tincture of opium, as any chemist will tell you—a perfect example of man’s inexhaustible genius for seeking oblivion from the world around him.

I once took a couple of drops, on the advice of a doctor, for a certain female complaint—it would relieve the cramp, he told me, and so it did.

All these years later, I recall the sensation of those feathery waves that bore me to sleep that night.

In the morning, I threw the bottle away.

But Mrs. Irving was another story. There was no hope for her, the doctor had said to me, so I measured the prescribed six or seven drops into the silver teaspoon and poured this draft between Mrs. Irving’s blistered lips.

Of course, Mrs. Irving could scarcely swallow, in her miserable condition.

I had to tilt back her chin so the liquid slid down her throat to her stomach and on into her blood, where it carried her to sleep—whether on feathery waves or not, Mrs. Irving couldn’t tell us.

But even when Mrs. Irving was asleep, or in that febrile state between sleep and consciousness, the pain never eased.

I would stare at her face that was the exact color and texture of beeswax—the flames had spared her above the neck, so she remained like a particularly lifelike doll against the white linen pillow—and watch in despair as the anguish flickered around her lips and nose and eyes.

I wondered what she was thinking. How you experienced physical agony when you were not awake to comprehend it.

As the fever built and the end drew near, I added more and more drops to each dose, until they overflowed the teaspoon and I administered the laudanum from a small cup instead.

On the last day, Mr. Irving came to stand by me while I counted the drops from the bottle.

He had scarcely slept. He had remained in a state of shock since the accident, the doctor confided to me.

Certainly his hair was in shock, sticking up from his head, and his beard stood in shock around his chin.

His eyes were wearily shocked, and his shocked mouth trembled as he watched his wife writhe upon the sheets I kept damp for her, burning to death, making the same noises a kitten makes when it can’t find its mother.

He laid a hand on my shoulder. (I can feel the weight of that hand, even now.) With the fingers of his other hand, he tipped the bottle back over the cup and enclosed my fingers in his palm.

I believe that was the first time he ever touched me.

Together we squeezed the dark liquid into the julep cup until the bottle was empty.

I remember feeling as if it were my own blood, draining from my fingertips in tiny, measured drops.

—

Dr. Hassler was more sanguine about the laudanum.

I suppose he’d had more practice at it. I discovered later, when the accounts of our ordeal filled the newspapers, that he had served as a ship’s surgeon during the time of the Mexican war, tending the wounds of soldiers evacuated from the battlefields, so he had no doubt hardened himself to suffering.

In any case, he counted out six or seven drops from the bottle in the medical bag and slipped them between Mr. Dobbs’s blistered lips without spilling so much as a trace, despite the ship’s continued dance to the beat of the waves.

Then he secured the cap on the bottle and turned to me.

“That should make him more comfortable, poor soul. And now I fear I must return to my own berth. I have but lately convalesced from a lengthy illness, as you see, and I hope to conserve a little strength for the trials ahead.”

“But who will look after the poor man?”

“You will, of course.” He smiled and turned to the man who held the lantern. “My dear fellow, would you be so kind as to assist me to my stateroom?”

“Of course, Doctor,” the man replied.

At the sound of his voice, I lifted my head.

I remember thinking that this was the first noise I had heard him utter, though he had held me briefly in his arms; I remember feeling, at the same instant—an instant that stretched into eternity, as if his words had stopped time itself—a jolt of electric terror.

His gaze settled on mine.

The shock struck me like a blow across the chest.

For I was already familiar with the stare from those hard brown eyes. I had first encountered them six days ago, in the back hallway of the Irvings’ house in Cambridge.

The bloodhound, it seemed, had followed me aboard.