The Pariah Page 11

  ‘Wardwell. But why don’t you call me Edward?’

  ‘All right. I’m John.’ And for the first time, we shook hands.

  I nodded towards the watercolour. ‘I know now why you were so anxious to lay your hands on that picture. I did a little detective work last night, and I found out what ship that is, in the background.’

  ‘Ship?’ asked Edward.

  ‘Come on, Edward, don’t act so innocent. That ship is the David Dark; and this picture must be one of the only surviving illustrations of it. No wonder it’s worth more than 50 bucks. I wouldn’t take less than a thousand.’

  Edward tugged at his beard, curling the hair of it around his fingers. He regarded me from behind his circular spectacles with watery eyes; and then let out a long, resigned puff of breath. Cough-candy, again; liquorice and aniseed.

  ‘I was hoping you wouldn’t find out,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I made an idiot of myself yesterday, running after you like that. I should have played it cool.’

  ‘You did arouse my interest. Now you’ve raised my financial expectations too.’

  ‘I can’t pay more than 300.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I simply don’t have more than 300, that’s why.’

  ‘But you said the Peabody was buying this,’ I told him. ‘Don’t tell me the Peabody only has 300.’

  Edward sat down, still holding the picture. ‘The truth is,’ he said, ‘the Peabody don’t know about this picture. In fact, the Peabody don’t know about any of the investigations I’ve been doing into the history of the David Dark. In Salem, and especially at the Peabody, the David Dark is something that people just don’t talk about. You say “David Dark”, and they say “Never heard of it,” and they make it pretty damn clear that they don’t want to hear about it, either.’

  I poured myself a whisky, and sat down opposite him. ‘But why?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘David Dark himself was supposed to have had conversations with the devil or something, wasn’t he? But I haven’t read anything which explains why they cut the ship’s name out of all of the records, or why people won’t talk about it.’

  ‘Well , I’m not sure, either,’ said Edward. He finished his beer, and put down the glass.

  ‘But I first came across the name David Dark the year that I joined the Peabody from college. They gave me a small exhibition to prepare, a special showcase depicting the history of the rescue and salvage operations that had gone on around Salem and Granitehead during the past three hundred years. It was pretty tedious stuff, to tell you the truth, apart from one or two spectacular wrecks on Winter Island, and a couple of whalers being overturned by humpbacks. But I was interested in one of the earliest documents I found, which was the log of the salvage vessel Mimosa, out of Granitehead. Apparently the captain of the Mimosa was a real 18th-century hotshot when it came to bringing up wrecks, and he successfully salvaged one of Elias Derby’s Chinamen when it was blown by a storm into the mouth of the Danvers River and sunk in six fathoms of water off Tuck’s Point. His name was Pearson Turner, and he kept a really meticulous log for five years, from 1701 to 1706.’

  ‘Go on,’ I said. I poked the fire to keep it crackling.

  There isn’t very much to tell,’ said Edward, ‘but one summer there was an unusually low tide in Salem Bay, and even the smaller ships were stranded on the mud. This was 1704, I think, or 1705. The low tide is mentioned in several other diaries and records as well, so it’s soundly authenticated. It was during this low tide that a friend of Pearson Turner’s spotted in the mud banks to the west of Granitehead Neck a protrusion from the mud which he took to be part of the bow castle of a sunken and half-buried ship.

  Pearson walked out to the wreck himself, in wading boots, although he was unable to get as close as he might have liked because the ooze was so soft. He did manage, however, to bring back to the shore a fragment of decorative moulding, and Esau Hasket, who owned the David Dark, tentatively identified it as part of his lost ship.’

  ‘Lost? The David Dark was lost?’

  ‘Oh, yes. She sailed out of Salem Harbour on the last day of October, 1692, and the only reason I know that is because it happens to be mentioned in the diaries kept by one of the early Salem wharfingers. He says something like, “A tempestuous north-westerly gale had been blowing for three days and showed no sign of letting up, but in spite of the perilous weather the David Dark set sail, the only vessel to do so during that whole wild week. She vanished into the storm and was never again seen in Salem.”

  That’s the gist of it, anyway. I can show you the diary itself, if you like.’

  ‘But what’s the connection with apparitions in Granite-head?’ I asked. There must be scores of wrecks around these shores.’

  As the fire blazed up, Edward unbuttoned his jacket. ‘Let me get you another beer first,’

  I told him.

  I went outside to the kitchen. At the foot of the staircase, I paused for a second or two, listening. I hadn’t been upstairs yet, not since I had seen the flickering light in there last night. I hoped to God there wasn’t anything up there which I didn’t want to see. I hoped to God that Jane wouldn’t appear again, not for her father, not for her mother, and especially not for me. She was dead but I wanted her to stay dead, for her own sake, and for the sake of our child who never was.

  When I came back with the beer, Edward was leafing through Great Men of Salem.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, then, ‘you’re not having trouble yourself, are you?’

  Trouble?’

  ‘You haven’t seen anything which might suggest that Jane’s trying to get in touch with you? Or maybe heard something? A lot of the Granitehead hauntings have been aural, rather than visual.’

  I sat down, realized my glass was empty, and stood up again. ‘I, er, I - no. No, nothing like that. I guess it only happens to old Graniteheaders. Not to us strangers.’

  Edward nodded, as if he accepted what I was saying, but didn’t completely believe me.

  ‘You were telling me about the connection between the David Dark and the hauntings,’ I reminded him.

  ‘Well ,’ he said, ‘it’s only fair to warn you that in strictly scientific terms, it’s a pretty tendentious connection. It wouldn’t win a history award. But I don’t know what sort of a world we’re dealing with here: I don’t know why these spirits are manifesting themselves, or what for, or how. It may just be an unpleasant freak of nature, something to do with weather conditions, or maybe it’s something to do with geographical location.

  Granitehead may be like Easter Island, a spot on the map that for completely incomprehensible reasons happens to be conducive to spiritual apparitions.’

  ‘But you think it’s the ship.’

  ‘I’m inclined to think it’s the ship. And the reason why I’m inclined to think it’s the ship is because I’ve discovered two accounts of the David Dark being prepared for her last voyage - one written before she sailed and the other written nearly eighty years later. I found the contemporary account in the most boring old book you could think of, a late 17th century treatise on maritime shipfitting and metalwork. It was written by a shipbuilder from Boston called Neames, and let me tell you that man was tedious. But right near the very end of the book he mentions the Salem coppersmiths of Perly and Fisk, and says what a magnificent job they were making of a “huge copper vessel” to be fitted inside the David Dark for the purpose of “containing that Great Foulness which has so plagued Salem, that we may look forward to its final removal.” ‘

  ‘You know this stuff by heart,’ I remarked, not altogether admiringly.

  ‘I’ve studied it often enough,’ said Edward. ‘But Jane was the one for learning history by heart. She could reel off dates and names like a memory bank.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, remembering the way Jane could memorize telephone numbers and birthdays. I didn’t really want to discuss Jane with Edward Wardwell; it was too sensitive a subject, and besides, I felt absurdly but strongly jea
lous that Edward had known her before me.

  ‘What was the other account?’ I asked him.

  ‘The later one - 82 years later, as a matter of fact -was contained in the memoirs of the Reverend George Nourse, who had lived and worked in Granitehead for most of his life.

  He said that one day in 1752 he attended the deathbed of an old-time Salem bo’sun, and the bo’sun asked him particularly to commend his soul to heaven,, since when he was younger he had spied on the secret loading of the David Dark’s last cargo, even though he had been warned that al who set eyes on it would be condemned to walk the earth forever, neither alive nor dead. When the Rev. Nourse asked the bo’sun what the cargo might have been, the bo’sun went into convulsions and started screaming about

  “Mick the Cutler”. The Rev. Nourse was greatly disturbed by this, and went to speak to all the cutlers in the Salem district to see if he could throw some light on what the bo’sun had said, but without success. But he later said himself that he was sure that he had seen the bo’sun after his death, just turning the corner by Village Street.’

  I sat back in my chair and considered what Edward Wardwell had been suggesting.

  Under normal circumstances, I would have dismissed it immediately as a fairy-story. But I knew now that fairies and goblins and all kinds of other manifestations might actually exist, and if a young man as serious as Edward Wardwell were convinced that the wreck of the David Dark was somehow influencing the community of Granitehead, then I was not too far away from taking him seriously.

  And what had that old witch-woman said to me on Salem Common? ‘It’s the place you die, not the time, that makes the difference. There are spheres of influence; and sometimes you can die within them, and sometimes you can die without them. The influence came, and then the influence fled; but there are days when I believe that it didn’t flee for good and all.’

  ‘Well ,’ I said at last, ‘I suppose you want this picture because it might give you some clues about what the David Dark might have been carrying?’

  ‘More than that,’ said Edward, T want to know what she looked like, as exactly as possible. I do have one sketch which is supposed to be the David Dark, but it isn’t even half as graphic as this.’

  He looked at me, and took off his spectacles. I knew that he wanted me to say that he could have the picture, that I would drop my thousand-dollar price to $300; but I wasn’t going to. There was always the remote possibility that he was a glib and creative confidence trickster, and that he had simply invented all these stories about Pearson Turner and the Rev. Nourse and ‘Mick the Cutler’. I didn’t really believe that he had, but I still wasn’t going to let my picture go.

  ‘The detail in this painting is vitally important,’ he said. ‘Although it isn’t very artistic, it looks reasonably accurate, and that means I can more or less estimate the size of the David Dark, and how many frames her hull was likely to have, and how her superstructure was fashioned. And that means that when I do find her, I can be sure I’ve located the right ship.’

  ‘When you what?’ I asked him. ‘When you find her?’

  Edward replaced his spectacles and gave me a small smile of modest pride. ‘I’ve been diving off Granitehead Neck for seven months now, trying to locate her. I haven’t been able to do too much diving during the winter, but now that spring’s here, I intend to start again in earnest.’

  ‘What the hell do you want to find her for?’ I asked him. ‘Surely, if she’s having this kind of influence on Granitehead, she’s better off under the water.’

  ‘Under the mud, you mean,’ said Edward. ‘She’ll be pretty deeply buried by now. We’ll be lucky if there’s even a few frame-tops showing.’

  ‘We’ll be lucky?’

  ‘There’s a couple of other guys from the museum helping me, and Dan Bass from the Granitehead Aqualung Club. And Gilly McCormick’s been my unofficial lookout and log-keeper.’

  ‘You really believe you can find this wreck?’

  ‘I think so. It’s not too deep around that side of the Neck, because of the way the mud builds up. There are dozens of wrecks down there, but almost all of them are yachts and small dinghies, all comparatively recent. We did come across the remains of a fabulous 1920s Dodge motorboat, but that couldn’t have sunk more than six months ago. When the summer comes, we intend to scan the seabed with EG & G sub-mud sonar, and see if we can pinpoint the David Dark precisely.’

  ‘Surely she would have decayed by now. There won’t be anything left to pinpoint.’

  ‘I think there will,’ Edward disagreed. ‘The mud there is so soft that you can plunge your arm into it right up to the elbow without any trouble at all. Once, I almost sank down to my waist. The David Dark, if she sank around there, would have been buried almost up to her original waterline pretty well straight away, and over the next few weeks she would have sunk deeper. All the timber under the mud would have been preserved intact, and as it happens a particularly cold current runs into Salem Bay around Granitehead Neck, and that would have had the effect of inhibiting decay in the timbers that remained exposed. Fungi and bacilli don’t like cold water, any more than gribble or nototeredo norvavica - that’s a woodboring mollusc, to you.’

  ‘Thanks for the marine biology lesson. But what are you hoping to do if you eventually locate the David Dark!’

  Edward spread his hands in surprise. ‘Bring her up, of course,’ he said, as if it had been obvious, all along. ‘Bring her up and find out what it is she’s carrying in her hold.’

  TWELVE

  Edward Wardwell drove us down to the West Shore Fishery in his dented blue Jeep, and I bought him a dinner of oyster stew and entrecote steak. For the first time in two days I discovered that I was really hungry, and I ate two portions of Irish barmbrack with my stew, and a heap of salad with my steak.

  The Fishery was decorated in that nets-and-lobsters style ubiquitous in restaurants all along the New England shoreline; but it was dim and relaxing and very normal in there, and the clams and flounder were better than most. All I wanted was good food and normality, especially after last night.

  Edward told me that he had started sub-aqua diving in San Diego, when he was 15 years old. ‘I’m not especially good at it,’ he said, buttering another piece of tea-bread, ‘but it did whet my appetite for underwater archaeology.’

  Contrary to the popular notion that the Pacific and the Caribbean were littered with the wrecks of Spanish treasure-ships, Edward said that the best-preserved vessels were almost always in northern waters. ‘In the Mediterranean, for example, a timber ship will last about five years under the water. In the Pacific, you’ll be lucky if it lasts just over a year. Ironwork, in warm water, will last only 30 or 40 years.’

  He drew circles on the tablecloth with the tip of his finger. ‘What you grow to understand when you get involved with underwater archaeology is that there is no such thing as “The Ocean”. The conditions under the ocean vary as much from one location to another as they do on land. Take the Wasa, which sank in Stockholm harbour in 1628 and was raised almost intact in 1961. She was in amazing condition, simply because the water was too cold for teredo molluscs to survive there, and attack her woodwork. And in the Solent, which is the entry to Southampton and Portsmouth harbours in England, the Royal George was still pretty solid after 53 years on the bottom, and the Edgar was still an obstruction to shipping after 133 years. The classic example, of course, was the Mary Rose, which sank in 1545. That was nearly 150 years before the David Dark went down, and yet half of her hull, the half that had been buried in the mud, had survived.’

  ‘It cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to bring up the Wasa and the Mary Rose,’ I reminded him. ‘How are you going to bring up the David Dark when you can’t even afford a thousand dollars for a picture?’

  ‘The first step is to locate her, to prove that she’s there. Once I’ve done that, I’ll be able to approach the Peabody and the Essex Institute and City Hall, and see what I can do about raising
finance.’

  ‘You’re pretty confident.’

  ‘I think I have to be. There are two compelling reasons for bringing up that wreck. One is its straightforward historical importance. The other is that it’s having this weird effect on the people of Granitehead.’

  ‘Well , I’ll go along with that,’ I said. I beckoned to the waiter to bring me another whisky.

  ‘I have a terrific idea,’ said Edward. ‘Why don’t you come diving with me over the weekend? If the weather’s reasonable, we plan to go down on Saturday morning, and maybe Sunday, too.’

  ‘Are you kidding? I never dived in my life. I’m from St Louis, remember?’

  ‘I’ll teach you. It’s as easy as breathing. It’s pretty murky down there, not like diving off Bermuda or anything like that. But you’ll love it, once you get used to it.’

  ‘Well , I don’t know,’ I said, reluctantly.

  ‘Just come try it,’ urged Edward. ‘Listen, you want to find out what happened to Mrs Edgar Simons, don’t you?

  You want to find out why all these ghosts have been walking in Granitehead?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’ll give you a call then, Saturday morning, if the weather clears. All you need to bring is a warm sweater, a windbreaker, and a pair of swimming shorts. I’ll supply the wet suit, and al the sub-aqua gear.’

  I drained the last of my drink. ‘I hope I haven’t let myself in for anything terrifying.’

  ‘I told you, you’ll love it. Oh - just remember not to have anything too rich for breakfast. If you vomit underwater, it can be really dangerous, sometimes lethal.’

  I gave him a slanted smile. ‘Thanks for the warning. Is a bowl of Wheaties overdoing it?’

  ‘Wheaties are fine,’ said Edward, quite seriously. Then he checked his waterproof diver’s watch, and said, ‘I’d better be going. My sister’s coming up from New York tonight, and I don’t want to leave her on the doorstep.’

  Edward drove me back up to Quaker Lane Cottage. ‘Do you know something interesting?’ he asked me, as he drew the Jeep to a jerking halt. ‘I once checked back on the origin of the name “Quaker Lane” because it always struck me as incongruous that a lane should have been named for the Quakers when there were never any around here. I mean, most of them, as you know, were centred around Pennsylvania; and as far as I could discover there were no records of any Friends in Granitehead, not until the middle of the 19th century.’