Spirit Lost (14 page)

It was just after midnight when Willy and John unlocked their front door and entered their Orange Street house. It was silent inside, and cold, for they had left the heat turned down while they were gone.

They turned up the thermostat; then Willy, who was tired in spite of her nap in the car, headed for the bedroom.

“Coming?” she asked John, and when he shook his head and said he wasn’t sleepy just yet, she only paused a moment, then swallowed whatever it was she had been going to say and went on into the bedroom alone.

John poured himself a brandy and soda and, keeping on his parka, because it would be coldest of all in the attic, where there was no heat, pulled on the light chain and went up the stairs into the cold, bright attic.

She was there, as he had thought she might be. She was in the darkest corner of the attic, without her cape now, dressed simply in a long dress of creamy, lacy cotton; her hair was pulled back and up in thick, dark sloping loops secured with ivory-headed pins. Somehow it amused him that she had a shawl of gray wool wrapped loosely around her shoulders, as if she were guarding against the cold. As if a ghost could feel cold, or warmth.

“You’ve come back,” she said, smiling, advancing just one step toward him. Her face was so beautiful, her expression so sweetly pleased by his presence.

“I’ve come back,” he agreed. He had vowed to himself not to be afraid, not anymore, and it wasn’t only fear that he felt now, really, though his heart knocked in his chest.

“It was cruel of you to go away,” she said, again smiling that sweet smile, almost flirtatiously.

“It is cruel of you to come here,” John responded, but he smiled, too, as he spoke to show this apparition he was friendly.

She drew back, surprised. “But this is my home!” she said.

“
Was
your home, perhaps,” John said. “It’s mine now—mine and my wife’s.”

The woman dropped her eyes. She was offended.

“I don’t like your wife,” she said petulantly, and then she let her shawl drop off
one shoulder and trail to the ground. She began to wander around the attic, slowly, trailing her shawl along the ground as she walked. Every now and then she would glance sidelong at John, with a sweet, challenging smile, and as she turned this way and that, as she traced her seemingly aimless path, John realized that she was showing off for him. Showing off her winsome beauty. She was petite and very slender. Thin as a wraith, he thought, and smiled to himself at the expression. He thought he would easily be able to close his hands around her waist. Through the stuff of her dress he could see the push of her breasts, which were like a girl’s, still small and high and peaked.

“Who are you?” he asked. “What’s your name?”

“Such impertinence!” she said in reply, stopping still in her movement. She had turned toward him, full face, and she was indignant. A flush rose up her neck, a rosiness so vivid against her pale skin that John almost felt the heat of it. They were only a few feet apart. “This is
my
house. My dearest husband built it for
me
. For me to come into as his bride. And you ask who I am!”

She was so angry that John would not have been surprised if she had hit him; he felt her anger that strongly.

But she turned away and walked slowly back to the end of the attic. Her shawl still trailed gracefully over one arm, its feathery tips dancing against the wooden floor.

She stopped, looked over her shoulder at him, and now she was smiling again, a different sort of smile, a suggestive, provocative, openly sexual smile.

“Perhaps you should find out who I am,” she said. “Perhaps you might like to make my acquaintance.”

Then she was gone.

She had vanished, disappeared, before his eyes. Now John was not surprised. He had told himself he should expect such a thing, and now that it had happened, he really was not surprised. He was, though, admiring. And curious. But not unhappy. And strangely, not frightened anymore. He felt invigorated. But now he turned and went back down the stairs and stood next to the bed, where he stripped off his parka and clothes and let them fall into a pile where he stood. He sank heavily into bed next to Willy and fell asleep at once.

The great white columned neoclassic library, with the name Atheneum announced in huge gold letters on the facade, looked forbiddingly grand compared to the modest village buildings surrounding it. Inside, it was surprisingly cozy. John was directed by a librarian to the section along the side of one wall that was devoted entirely to books on Nantucket. There were dozens. He selected a few of the oldest histories and carried them to a corner where the afternoon sun fell from high windows across the wooden table, making the yellow oak gleam.

There were entire books or sections of books devoted to the most famous families of the island, the Coffins and Starbucks and Macys and Husseys. There were ships’ logs and chronicles and lists and charts and documents by the score, but it wasn’t until the library was almost ready to close, two hours after he had started his search, that John found what he wanted. In a dog-eared, cottony-paged leather-bound book published in the 1920s, in the section entitled “Tragedies, Disasters and Bizarre Misfortunes,” among tales of shipwrecks and mutinies, town fires and scandals, was an entry about “The Widowed Bride.”

One of Nantucket’s most romantic and saddest histories is that of Captain John Wright and Jesse Orsa Barnes.

Captain Wright met Miss Barnes in 1823 when he was twenty-four, a young Nantucket man who had just finished his first and extremely successful whaling cruise. Captain Wright had gone to Boston on legal matters and had visited at the home of relatives, where he met Miss Barnes, who was then seventeen and already known for her beauty. She is said to have been a slight, slender woman, graceful and delicate, with large dark eyes and long, thick, lustrous dark hair. (This in contrast to the descriptions of the island women, who, according to reports, tended to be large, husky, practical, and strong enough to perform the work of men—which, as their men were always gone, they had to do.)

Captain Wright was smitten at once and vowed to make young Miss Barnes his bride. He stayed on and on in Boston, delaying the next sailing of his ship, in order to meet Miss Barnes and persuade her to be his wife. Miss Barnes was reluctant to leave the society of Boston for the isolation of Nantucket, but Captain Wright persuaded her by saying that if she would be his wife, he would build her a fine, elegant home on Orange
Street, which was where the “aristocracy” of Nantucket lived at that time. In addition, it must be stated that Captain Wright was himself a fine figure of a man, though not overly tall, still of noble bearing, and strikingly handsome, with blue eyes and dark hair and a graceful demeanor.

Finally, against the advice of her friends and guardian (for Miss Barnes was an orphan and an only child), she agreed to marry Captain Wright when he returned from his next whaling expedition. Miss Barnes’s love for her fiancé must have been strong, for during the three years he was away, she was proposed to many times by men far wealthier than the captain, with far more to offer her in the way of culture and position and society. But for three years she waited for her affianced, attending only small gatherings and spending most of her time hand-sewing her wedding trousseau.

In May 1826, Captain Wright returned home from his second and even more profitable whaling voyage. In the summer of that year the work was completed on the elegant neoclassic house he had had built on Orange Street, complete with servants’ quarters, six fireplaces, and a widow’s walk.

In September of that year, Captain Wright married Jesse Orsa Barnes in Christ Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and brought her home to Nantucket to live. Because Captain Wright was so wealthy, she had servants and did not have to perform menial tasks, as earlier Nantucket whaling wives had had to. It is reported that because of Jesse Orsa’s beauty and refinement and education, she was shunned by the women of the island and considered to be haughty and even arrogant. And although the Quakerism of the island was waning at this time, still she was considered by the island to engage too often in frivolities and improprieties: She had her harmonium brought with her from Boston, and she often played and sang, with the windows open so that the music could drift out onto the streets and be heard by passersby. She had been seen, through those same open windows, dancing by herself to the tunes from her music box. She also drank liquor openly, engaged in smoking in her own house, and ordered books sent to her from the mainland that the
librarian would never have allowed in the Atheneum. She rarely socialized with the island women and never attended any of the churches.

Captain Wright’s ship, the
Parliament
, was due to leave Nantucket on another whaling cruise in November, but according to accounts, the departure was delayed time and time again due to Jesse Orsa’s pleas to her new husband not to leave her so soon. It was said by those who visited the couple that never before had they seen a woman so obviously enamored of and devoted to her husband.

Unfortunately, Jesse Orsa was lucky to have detained her husband for as long as she did, for the
Parliament
left in the spring of 1827 and returned in the summer of 1830 with the tragic news that young Captain Wright was dead. He had not left his young bride with child when he set out, and so she had no child of his for solace. She had no friends on the island and no living relatives in all the world. She lived alone in her elegant, large house on Orange Street, the house her fiancé had promised her if she would be his bride, until she died at the age of eighty-one, a lonely and bitter woman.

Here the account ended at the top of the page so that on the left page and the right two portraits could be shown, in black and white: oils of Jesse Orsa Wright and Captain John Wright. John Constable stared at the pictures, transfixed. There was no denying the remarkable resemblance between himself and the young captain. And there was no denying that the picture of “The Widowed Bride” was a picture of the ghost, the beautiful young apparition he had spoken with only the night before.

He was so stunned that he did not think to turn the page, to read on, to see if the account continued.

At dinner that night he could scarcely hear what Willy said, scarcely force himself to respond intelligently. He was obsessed with what he had learned and thought over and over again: I am not mad. I am not hallucinating. She does exist. She does exist.

He went to the attic that night.

The woman was standing by the window, gazing out at the dark harbor. Her hair was loosened and hung in shining waves down to her waist. John thought she was wearing the same cotton dress she had worn the night before, but when she turned, he saw that instead she wore a cotton nightgown. It fell from many tiny pleats at the shoulders, over the small pronounced bosom, to the floor. Lacework intricately edged the shoulders and collar and cuffs, and while it was a discreet gown, it was also alluring, because its sheerness made obvious the fact that the woman wore no undergarments.

John cleared his throat. He was excited, frightened, aroused.

“You are here,” he said, smiling.

The woman returned his smile. “Yes,” she said. “I am always here—waiting.”

“I know who you are now,” John said. “Jesse Orsa Wright.” When she did not reply, he continued. “The widowed bride of Captain John Wright, who died at sea during his third command.”

He was surprised to see how she lowered her lids at that, and twisted her mouth, so that she looked sardonic, even bitter.

“You are such a gentleman,” she said.

John paused, uncertain what she meant by the remark. Then he said, “I should introduce myself. I’m John Constable.”

Again that bitter smile.

“I like your name,” she said.

“I like yours,” he replied. Then, more boldly, “There are so many questions I would like to ask you.”