Ghost

It was supposed to be so simple, if an escape in the dead of night can be called simple. We knew there would be rumors and wild speculation – in fact, we counted upon it – but never in a thousand lifetimes could we have guessed that our story would become legend, and that the legend would be so far from the truth.

The ship was said to be unlucky, everyone knew that. A change of name and a fresh coat of paint couldn't do away with whatever malevolent spirit seemed to haunt her. She had collided with and sunk another ship in London, she had run aground in a storm and lay abandoned on a tiny island for a time…even the man who bought and restored her soon lost her to his creditors. Why Catherine's husband thought a vessel with such a sordid past would make a fine purchase, and one for him to captain as well as own, in part, was a mystery to us both, and to so many others in years to come.

More than anything else, it was his choice of the ship's new name that finally spurred her into action, I believed. His coldness, his cruelties, his sanctimonious veneer of piety, his infidelities; all of this she had forced herself to accept for the sake of her child and for peace in the home. But this final insult could not be borne.

"Has he so little regard for my dignity? Or is it my intelligence he doubts?" she demanded, voice trembling with indignation. We rarely spoke of him when huddled together in my rented room (the boarding-house landlady thought nothing of allowing my "cousin" to visit me regularly), but on this occasion her anger could not be contained. "Either he believes me so simple as to be unaware of his latest dalliance, or he has no qualms about bringing me – myself and our daughter – along to christen this foolish purchase named after his inamorata." I myself might have used a harsher word, but not Catherine, not my refined, well-read lady. "Either way, the disrespect is astounding. Can he not honor me as an individual, as a woman, if not as a wife?"

"He does not deserve you," I told her, for perhaps the thousandth time. An idea, long shapeless and gestating in my mind, was finally beginning to take form as we lay there, her reclined in my arms. "And that's why this ship should be the means through which he finally loses you."

Catherine shifted, turning to look at me. "What can you mean?" We both knew she had longed to leave him for nearly as long as they had been wed, but with our society and its laws as they were, it was barely worth speaking of. She was his, as was their money and their children. He could and would pursue her if she fled, and the scandal that was sure to follow would ruin any new life that she attempted to create – all the more so if our connection, hers and mine, were to be discovered.

But not if he truly believed her deceased.

From that moment on, the plan came together with remarkable ease. We needed an accomplice aboard another ship, ideally a small and unremarkable one nearing the end of its own voyage, so that she could quietly slip from her husband's wretched vessel and quickly vanish into a new city with her child – and with me. At first I intended to secure passage on the other ship and reunite with the pair of them upon their escape, but fear of an unpredictable obstacle, be it delays, illness, dangerous weather or even her husband's suspicious eye, led me to seek employment upon the same ship on which my beloved traveled. If worse came to worst, we could attempt to disappear somewhere on the Continent after landing. He would have a harder time tracking her there. At least we would be together.

Having had passed myself off as similar characters several times in the past and possessing the skills required, I expected no trouble in securing a position as second mate – the navigator – on the ship's seven-man crew. For one, I had little competition; a number of local seamen had heard about the ship's infamous past and wanted no part in its dark tale. I did not expect, however, to be summoned to a private audience with the captain himself.

"I will have only men of upright character on this voyage," he informed me sternly, his cold blue eyes locked upon me. It was the first time we had come face-to-face in the two years since Catherine and I had met, and the moment was beyond surreal. "My wife and daughter will be aboard, and I will tolerate not a whiff of indecorous behavior."

I swallowed a number of retorts about his own less-than-admirable behavior and said only "of course, sir," affecting a slight Dutch accent, as befit my sailor persona. "I will treat them with the greatest care and respect, just as I would on land." Which cannot be said for you. I must have convinced him, because I left his office with the contract signed and my heart pounding like a drum.

From there I had only to peruse the listings at the city's shipping companies, and then to spend an evening in a shipyard pub, where I spotted Thomas, a sailor with whom I had become acquainted at The Slide Club some blocks to the north some months ago. He was delighted by my daring plan of romantic flight and agreed to take a position aboard the Orchid, the brigantine whose voyage to Lisbon intersected closely with our ship's intended path. We decided to stage the escape on the night of the 29th of November, when the new moon would provide us with much-needed cover.

Perhaps the scheme was not as simple as we allowed ourselves to believe, with so much left up to chance, but the way in which the pieces all seemed to fall neatly into place encouraged our conviction that we were destined to succeed, that we were following the fate intended for the star-crossed pair of us. That is, until the aftermath.

We set sail on the 7th – the original date was two days prior, but the inclement weather that altered our departure also delayed that of the Orchid, yet another piece of perfect luck on our side – and the voyage was entirely unremarkable. Catherine steadfastly avoided all unnecessary interaction with me, as planned, as a respectable captain's wife would not dream of socializing with sailors. Despite this, in the weeks leading up to the departure I had insisted that she rehearse the habit of referring to me only as "Mr. Dahl," lest a slip of the tongue in mixed company spoil everything. Still, neither of us could hide a slight trace of a smile during our brief and stiffly formal moments of contact on the quarterdeck to which she was restricted.

The final days of the voyage were among the slowest of my life, and of Catherine's as well. Even her child (our child, as I had come to think of her) seemed more prone to tearful storms of displeasure, as though she too was powerfully impatient for the moment of escape to arrive, though it may simply have been the characteristic whims of a two-year-old.

Only once did I fear we might fail. "Should we not have spotted land by now?" he queried in an undertone, addressing the first mate, Mr. Richard, and myself. He peered through his spyglass again. "Surely we are not far from Santa Maria Island."

He may have been an inexcusably poor husband and father, but he was an exceptional seaman. We had not yet approached the Azores archipelago because I had ensured that we would not. Owing to the need to cross paths, or nearly, with the Orchid, I had tampered with the ship's chronometer some days before. My prized lock-picking tools had so many uses. I foisted the captain off with some vague explanation that seemed satisfactory, though I later learned noted the anomaly in his logbook, as he did so many other details.

The Orchid appeared in the distance on the 28th, and the 29th dawned brisk and sunny, with day gradually giving way to a calm night, a gentle breeze rippling the surface of the sea. I had arranged to take night watch during the necessary hours, and when I spotted the spark of light that was Thomas' lantern in his lifeboat, like a tiny star fallen from the dark sky above, I had to suppress the urge to shout for joy.

I crossed to the binnacle on the deck and, muffling the sound with a heavy blanket, crushed the ship's compass with a heavy iron taken from below. The chronometer I simply heaved into the sea, as it was too risky to take along with us. At the time I felt no guilt whatever about it; there was more than enough food and water aboard, and I was sure the other six crew members would suffer no more than the tedium of several additional days at sea before resuming their intended route. We were already so close to land.

I then crossed to Catherine's impossibly small private quarters and softly knocked upon the door in the same code we used back in New York. She emerged wrapped in a shawl but carrying none of her belongings; she had to leave everything behind, of course, to facilitate the ruse. The child in her arms slept peacefully, aided by a few sips of brandy given to her some hours before to assure her silence in the night.

Thomas pulled alongside the ship, and we carefully, silently made our way into the lifeboat.

Thinking, no doubt, of Lot's wife in Genesis, Catherine refused to look back at the ship as we made our way toward the Orchid, but I could not resist watching it shrink behind us. Later I privately wondered if that action was what caused all the uproar that followed.

We did not celebrate the success of our plan until we were several days settled in Portugal, but the time that followed was the happiest we had shared thus far. We were not truly free, of course, but we had long accepted that we never would be. But we could spend whole nights in one another's arms, stroll the streets holding our daughter's hands, while away afternoons at outdoor cafes, dining on fresh-caught seafood and egg custard tarts invented by long-ago monks, we were told…such joy was beyond words.

And then the story began to spread. The ship had been found abandoned, floating hundreds of miles from its last recorded location, and a contentious legal battle had begun over the salvage rights. A sailor from the ship that had discovered her was accused, and later exonerated, of some act of foul play, but no one could find a trace of any of the ten souls aboard.

Catherine and I followed the case obsessively, though we had more questions than perhaps anyone else. We had believed that the captain would assume that she had fallen overboard and I perished attempting to save her life, or perhaps I had caused both of our deaths by some heinous act upon her. If our absence was discovered earlier than we had intended and the Orchid was still in sight, then the captain would surely have set off in pursuit. But why the entire crew would have abandoned the ship – the lifeboat was missing, we learned – was beyond our comprehension. A makeshift sounding rod was also found aboard, suggesting they had made it to shallow waters and had not immediately left the ship upon finding us gone. What could possibly have occurred?

"We could not have known," I assured Catherine, many times over. "We never thought to risk any lives but our own. Some strange act of God has taken place, and it's not for us to know." Some days she believed me, other days she did not. Those days she tended only to her child and made no room for any other joy, consumed as she was by (misplaced) guilt. Her husband had made his choices, but the thought of those six other lives never left us.

The rest of the world was only too happy to speculate. Many argued it was foul play by one of the crew, either a mutiny or an insurance scheme of some sort. Other suggested pirates were to blame, though why such ruthless figures would abduct everyone aboard and plunder none of the goods was unknown. Still others were convinced of a supernatural or religious explanation – a very small and concentrated Rapture, perhaps? Catherine particularly liked this idea, as it suggested that all ten of us were worthy of immediate ascension into Heaven.

The wild rumors intensified several months later when a newspaper in California published a far more colorful version of events, claiming that ship was in perfect condition, the fires still lit and dinner "scarcely cold" upon the table when she was found floating unmanned. We knew it had to be nonsense – the sailors who discovered her said nothing of the sort during the trial, and the captain would never have left her in such a state, even if he had abandoned ship in a state of panic. The most foolish seaman alive would not dare leave fires unattended with so many barrels of denatured alcohol aboard.

However, it was only to our advantage to have the facts misrepresented so. We had traveled through Spain and France and had taken up short-term residence in London when I had the idea. While aboard a train we had overheard fellow passengers discussing the story, with the newspaper story's fictitious details altered yet further, as is often the case with gossip. Knowing, as I did, that there were no better conduits of tall tales and outlandish rumors than sailors making their ways around the world, one evening I again disguised myself as Mr. Dahl, or some version of him, and made my way down to the city's bustling docks. There, I found a busy pub, much like the one in which I found our angel Thomas, and enlivened anyone who would listen with my "eyewitness" tale of the famous ghost ship.

And what a story it was. I endeavored to outdo the California story in all ways, telling of a noble doctor who had fought bravely for the Union before stepping aboard the cursed ship, a vengeful crewman bent on murder, and all manner of supernatural events. "The charm what the old woman gave him had magical powers, so it did," I slurred loudly, banging my tankard for emphasis. "I saw it glow with my own two eyes! It saved the doctor's life, sure as I'm sitting here."

Many of the sailors gathered around laughed and chimed in with additional details, believing my tale to be merely the entertaining ravings of a drunkard, as I intended. I did not need them to believe my version as fact, they only needed to enjoy the story and take it with them, further mingling truth and fantasy.

A young ship's surgeon seated at the bar close to me seemed particularly intrigued by my yarn-spinning. "But did the charm cause the captain's wife and child to be spirited away somewhere, or were they slain by the villain?" he asked, leaning forward.

"Er – slain, of course," I improvised. "Cut down in the bloom of youth by that devil." He continued to pepper me with questions throughout the night, and I gave whatever answers sounded sufficiently outrageous.

Years passed before the anonymous short story appeared in a London monthly magazine, and it was longer still before we made the connection between the unknown author and the eager surgeon I'd met. Only a few years after that, he rose to great fame with his stories of a brilliant and eccentric detective, and Catherine joked that he owed us a percentage of his great wealth, as I had unwittingly launched his writing career.

He used many of my ludicrous details and added several of his own, though curiously, he maintained the true names of the two ships in question: the Dei Gratia, the ship that had discovered ours ("by the grace of God indeed," Catherine said when we first heard of her name), and of our ship. Though he, perhaps inadvertently, altered the name from "Mary" to "Marie," an error undoubtedly appreciated the captain's mistress back in America, and Marie Celeste was the name she took into history.

As the years went on, I used the "Mr. Dahl" identity only sparingly, though Catherine occasionally called me by that name in moments of jest or affection. But usually she called me by my given name, Virginia, which I had never loved until I heard her say it.

We spoke less and less of the famous ship as time went on, preferring to live only in our simple, blissful present and dream only of our joyous future.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: names have been changed out of respect to the real-life figures, including Captain Benjamin Briggs, who by all accounts was not an evil jerk. Sorry. A lot of other details are real, though! Thanks to the Stuff You Should Know podcast for a handy crash course in this tale. <3