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 mollusk, 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 mollusks 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.