She looked into my eyes and offered a tight smile. I felt certain that my ruse had not been accepted.
“And every husband is delayed on the road,” she said. “And every road leads to hell.”
It was not as though I had better options. The accommodations were homely but the linens were of a fine hand. The food was good and plain.
I’d come to Providence to make a portrait, a particular rendition of my own visage, and the man I meant to meet had no notion I was coming. It was a wild afternoon in November, and my arrival was veiled by weather. I had no wish to be recognized, and so the rain bothered me not at all, though when I ascended to my room, I hung my dress to dry and returned to the dining room in another gown, this one charcoal hatched with violet stripes, a changeable taffeta petticoat in rose and canary.
In the daguerreotype I planned, I’d look like a woman dressed in dark, but in truth, I was as a nightbird’s wing, flashing my colors. There was a whimsy in that, and though I had suffered, I still had enough humor to see the wit of a woman garbed in silk peacockery, appearing, when drained of color, to be a widow in mourning. I wanted levity in the daguerreotype, if indeed I would be carrying it with me for the rest of my life.
I sat at a small table with a plate of boiled meat, and the innkeeper kept my tea hot. There were curtains hanging all about me, toile printed with scenes of exploration in some unknown country, a legacy of a former life. They were of French manufacture, I believed, though this town was on the eastern coast of America. I ate quietly, contemplating my mission, considering the streets with their cobblestones, the daguerreotypist’s parlor, the items in my valise upstairs.
Eventually the innkeeper emerged again. She’d taken down her hair and drawn a muted paisley shawl about her shoulders. Her hair was an unlikely platinum, near enough to white that I’d thought her older than she was, and it was loose now, in waves down from her pins. It was beautiful, though she was not. It seemed to me that this mattered, though I’d known beautiful women dead in the same circumstances as those whose faces had less grace. Beauty, it seemed to me, was a lie told to girls, a fairytale of prospects and princes, and as my own face had aged, I’d come to wonder whether anything of it was truth at all. Whatever beauty I possessed had only brought me trouble.
“A sip for a storm,” the innkeeper said. I looked at her, feeling weary, though the fire blazed up, and it was warm enough in the room. I’d left New York scarcely recovered from the last fever, and from the ghastliness thereafter. This portrait and photographer were my only hope.
She sat opposite me. I could smell her perfume, a mixture of salts and camphor.
She poured sherry, her hand steady, and I could see her smile, though her head was bowed. It was a smile that said she knew my history. Some jilting, some man turned marauder, or perhaps wed to another lovelier than I. Perhaps she thought I’d promised myself to a sailor, and now waited in vain for his bones to walk out from the bay.
I saw her glance at my waistline, but there was nothing there to betray me. No, what inhabited me hid more efficiently than that.
Beneath my dress, I wore a strand of beads made of amber, the better to absorb the energy of the thing I carried. Sometimes at night I woke, chilled and sweating, gasping, unable to swallow, but I was here, was I not? I’d managed the journey. It had been a question, my body racked with spasms, curled against the hard leather seat.
I’d twisted my wedding ring seven times around my finger, and then taken it off and put it on a chain about my neck for fear of losing it. My father was certain I’d acquired it of a tinker, roadside shine bought as an additive to my delusions of a paramour. He understood nothing.
I’d reduced in weight during in the sixmonth I’d spent an invalid, plagued by visions and panics, surrounded by delicate pieces of dark. This in spite of the midnight meals I’d consumed—no, nothing to speak on, nothing to think on. They had not fed me.
Now I was here. This was a cure, or so a medium in New York had told me.
“Go to this daguerreotypist,” said the woman met in a district otherwise filled with stables and snorting animals, passing me a card with an address. She was in the upper quarters, a gown of dark pink embroidery, a face like a crystallized fig, all folds and sugary creases, poisonously edible. “Hire him to take your portrait.”
A photographer of ghosts. There was a fashion toward such things at that time, but this studio, that of Masury & Hartshorn, was particular. Both of the main photographers there were of unusual lineage, she told me. Messr. Hartshorn was a stag turned man by a jealous god two thousand years before, and Messr. Masury was the son of a ghoul, but, by all accounts, tremendously polite. They ran a specialist studio. There was a photographer there, this medium swore, who might use the camera to save my soul, if anything remained of it. His name was whispered in these circles, though it was not one the studio advertised.
That was why I had come here, at considerable peril, and this was my aim. A session that would save me. A portrait that would free me from the burden I carried.
The man I was to meet was called Edwin Manchester, an apprentice who had come to photography from the spiritual movement. He was well known in the circles I’d come to rely upon, and had, according to the medium, purged one Miss Valpareille of a demon that had taken up residence inside the chambers of her heart. His method of photography extracted whatever creature had nestled within the person being photographed.
If there was a stowaway inside my body, this portrait would snatch it out. The portrait, then, would depart with me, and though it was necessary I keep it under lock and key, the stowaway would be trapped inside it for as long as the portrait existed. So I hoped and so I prayed. I could not spend my nights the way I’d spent them of late.
The mistress leaned back in her chair. I noticed a woven bracelet around her wrist, the same platinum as her own tresses, twisted into a complicated pattern, a mourning bracelet, but for the large gemstone at the center, wreathed in hair. A star sapphire. The star gleamed in the same way her eyes did. It was not from here. A sailor for her too, it seemed, someone who’d raided a faraway treasure, or traded with a woman for her jewels.
“Best to close the curtains,” the innkeeper said, calmly as though she were telling me she’d prepared hot milk to better my sleep. “Men may come out from the water at night, and you would rather they not see you, though if you desire you may look out from behind the drape.”
“Men?” I asked. “What men? The men from the town? From a ship?”
She spoke as though what she said was nothing strange, nothing the least unusual, and in truth, my recent history had convinced me there was nothing impossible in the world, that anything might happen, and to anyone.
“There is a ship anchored in the bay. Out of it come explorers, drenched and walking inland toward the light of the town. They carry lanterns, and come bearing maps, but the maps do not depict any place the barmen have heard tell of, nor do they reveal any mark in their topographical lines to remind one of anything near here. Drear, the men are, dressed in creamy silk waistcoats, and long black tails. With the dawn they walk back into the water.”
“I had not realized I was to hear of ghosts,” I commented, mildly enough, but the story, I worried at like a knot. I’d heard stories before, and some of them were true. I lived in the center of a narrative that no reasonable person would perceive as plausible. This one, that of a ship of the dead, chilled me. I had known other stories about ships.
I peered out into the street and saw all sorts of men with all sorts of countenances, all in their dark and drear, all with their eager eyes and long mustaches, but none of them came out of the bay.