“Though seeing you now, I don’t agree. You are a fine lady from the city, and, even in his youth, he carried the stench of the fishing boats.” She did not sit but leaned on the other chair while she talked.
I saw his pipe resting on the mantel and my eyes started to well up, knowing that I would not see him again. “I hope he did not suffer,” I said.
“That day, he took to his bed after his breakfast and would not get out of it, even to sup, but once the storm started, I heard him go outside. I found him facing the sea, screaming into the waves. I tried to coax him back into the house, but he said that his friends who had died at sea had come for him. They were standing on the shore talking to him, and he was calling them by name.”
“Yes, he told me that he imagined that sort of thing,” I said.
“Imagined? There is no imagining, miss, when voices call to you from the sea. If you heard them just one time, you know that they are as real as this table.” She thumped her fist on it to make her point, rattling my teacup in its saucer. “Did I imagine it when, as a little girl, Pap and me walked to the abbey at night, much against the wishes of my mother-God rest her soul-and we listened to the cries of Constance.”
“Constance? He only told me of St. Hild.” I remembered that sunny day when I was too hot to let him finish his tale.
The whaler’s daughter sat down on the chair opposite me, wrapping her teacup in her bony hands. She had short fingers with prominent joints that reminded me of the talons of birds of prey. “Constance of Beverley was a wicked nun who forsook her vows to take up with a lover, a French knight with a bad reputation. As penance, she was buried alive in the walls of the convent. Some nights, you can still hear her scream for release. But St. Hild keeps her there as a warning to women who might succumb to temptation.”
I shuddered, remembering my own experience at Whitby Abbey.
“You weren’t the only fancy Londoner who enjoyed my father’s tales,” the old lady offered with considerable pride.
“Is that so?” Kate always said that if you allowed someone to talk enough, they would tell you everything you needed to know.
“Another fellow, a very important personage of the theater, sat here in this very room listening to old Father’s stories.”
Pleased that I did not have to find a way to bring up the subject of the red-haired man, I tried to sound as if my interest in him was casual. “Oh, yes, he pointed that fellow out to me once. Do you know his name?”
“I knew it, but, as old Pap used to say, I forgot it as soon as I remembered it.” She laughed at her own construct of words. “But he could not get enough of the old man’s tales. You see, miss, he is a writer come to Whitby for inspiration. For we have here a most interesting population of spirits, ready to show themselves to whoever is looking in their direction. This fellow said that all London was still living under the terrible threat of the Ripper and that he wanted to make up a similar sort of character, but have him be even more atrocious, something more terrifying than a man, something akin to Mr. Spring-Heeled Jack. For, as he said, who is to prove that those Whitechapel women were not murdered by something more monster than human?”
A few times I had caught some of my students reading the outlandish tales of Spring-Heeled Jack, the monster who wore gentleman’s clothes, but had great batlike wings, pointy ears, red eyes, and the ability to leap great lengths. Inevitably, there was one girl in each class who had inherited a copy from an older brother and used it to frighten the smaller girls.
“And such a monster may indeed have come here to plague us, as if we need more unnatural creatures on this shore!” She picked up a copy of the
“Yes, I have,” I said, standing up. “You are quite certain that the man with the red hair is an artistic sort of person and not a newspaperman?”
“The fellow said he was here to collect stories to put in books and on the stage. He already wrote two books that no one paid much attention to, poor fellow, but he believed that after all the murders committed by the butcher of London, the town was ripe for the appearance of a fresh monster, and that Whitby was just the place to find such a creature in our store of goblins and ghosts.”
I said good-bye to the whaler’s daughter and left the cottage with mixed emotions. While I realized that Lucy’s future was not mine to decide, I did not want to be the one to deliver her into the hands of Morris Quincel.
I located the building that housed his painting studio and rang the bell. An older woman with gray curls escaping her white house cap opened the door.
“I am looking for Mr. Morris Quince, the American painter?” I said politely. She looked at me with suspicious eyes. Of course, she had seen Lucy at the apartments and must have thought that I was just another of Morris’s conquests.
“Well, you’re too late,” she said with a look of mean satisfaction.
“How is that, madam?” I asked politely.
“He left yesterday. Packed up his things and went back to America. Now I have a vacancy during the high season, and it’s too late to advertise.”
I supposed that the shock registered on my face.
“So, he surprised you too, did he? Well, you are not the only young lady to come round. But you are the prettiest, if that gives you any consolation. The last one was as brittle as a bird and a bit too eager.”
I gathered that she meant Lucy. “Did he leave a forwarding address or a message of any sort for a Miss Westenra?”
“He left nothing behind but soiled sheets, the dirt from his boots, and a couple of empty canvasses,” she said bitterly, closing the door in my face.
A light sprinkle began to fall on me, but I was in no hurry to deliver the grim news to Lucy, who was probably still sleeping off her sedative. The sky was darkening ever quicker as the end of summer approached. The sun had gone into hiding behind an ominous steel-gray cloud that hung above like a big flatiron. The air felt decidedly different from yesterday-cooler, sharper. Autumn was on its way.
With a heavy heart, I walked up the steps to the churchyard. I raised the hood of my cape and opened my umbrella. Headmistress had given it to me for my twenty-first birthday, knowing how fond I was of the purple foxglove that bloomed in the park. When open, the underside revealed in each of the panels a spray of painted stems, lush with lavender bells. “No matter how bad the weather, you will always be able to look up and see something that will cheer you,” she had said, knowing that my quiet moods often concealed an orphan’s melancholy.
Sheltered, I walked the cemetery to look for the old whaler’s grave, but gave up what with the rain pouring down around me. Hot tears began to roll down my cheeks. All good things ended. Lucy had been ecstatic when she was with her lover. She had been so certain of his love, as certain as I had been of Jonathan’s feelings for me and of his intention to marry me. I walked to the bench where the old whaler had told me his stories, trying not to let the actions of Morris Quince bring up my fear that Jonathan had deserted me; tried to push out of my mind the vision of returning to my room at the school and seeing my mail basket empty.
The rain beat down in staccato on my umbrella. I tilted it back to see a large black vulture flying overhead in defiance of the weather. The creature had an immense wingspan, circling and soaring above me. I watched his performance, wondering if he was stalking a small animal in the vicinity-dead or living-upon which he would prey. Finally he flew away, disappearing into the clouds.
I looked out to sea where the ruined vessel, the
A controversy had arisen over whether to repair the ship or to destroy it. According to the newspapers, an anonymous individual had chartered the boat in Rotterdam. This person was supposed to have been a passenger on
