Now, try as he might, the captain had not been able to kill his wife’s young lover in the long year they had been at sea.
With each day he feared their return to Salem and the loss of his young wife, whom he had begun to dream of feverishly every night as they got closer and closer to home. He began to pray that the sailor would die before they reached Salem. And as even our darkest prayers are sometimes answered, the unfortunate sailor contracted yellow fever. And so the captain left him on the Miseries, to die with the others before the waning of the moon.
The captain returned to port, and his wife was waiting on the wharf as the ship landed. His heart leaped at the sight of her. Was it possible? Did she finally love him? But it wasn’t to be. When she looked at him, her eyes held nothing but hate. Her gaze moved beyond him, scanning the crowd for her true love. His rage was murderous, and he shouted aloud without any thought to listening ears. “An entire year gone and not even a tender look for me?”
And though it would have been in her best interest to do so, she could not feign even the slightest warmth for the man who had taken her true love from her. She could not lie.
During his long months at sea, the captain had almost been able to convince himself that she would love him one day, but now he feared it would never be.
He rushed toward her, grabbing her roughly by the arm and pulling her down the street. “Your lover is dead,” he told her coldly. “He died of the yellow fever, crying out in pain and suffering. And he never cried your name, but the name of the South Sea maiden he got the fever from.”
“You killed him,” she said, not believing his story about the maiden but desperately fearing that her true love might be dead.
“Don’t you hear me, girl?” he said, digging his fingers into her arm. “I told you he was dead. Infected, as all men are, by a faithless woman.” Then he dragged her back to the house while the towns people watched in horror.
He beat her until she cried out. But without her sailor, Zylphia had no will to live. She did not try to stop him. When he finally struck her with his closed fist, she fell to the floor, motionless and mute.
For the first time, the captain feared he might lose her, not to the sailor but to death. He cradled her in his arms, begging her to come back to him and vowing to nurse her back to health.
He carried her downstairs, to a room with cooler air and a view of the ocean. In the days to come, he cooked for her. But she would not eat. He bought fresh fruit and sugar, which he knew she had loved, but still she would take nothing. On the third day, the housekeeper appeared at the door, with a pig roast and apples and some soup made of mutton and celery.
“It is no use,” the captain said. “She is beyond nourishment and will take no food.”
“Let me see her,” the old woman suggested. “For it is her choice to live or to die.”
Desperate for her help, and knowing about the Haitian woman’s healing powers, the captain let the old woman into Zylphia’s sickroom.
“Leave us,” she said, and the captain obliged.
The old woman sat on the edge of the bed. “Your true love lives,” she whispered, and at those words Zylphia opened her eyes.
The captain was so grateful to the housekeeper that he offered to take her back with full wages, but she refused, saying she would stay only long enough to prepare their meal. When the food was ready and the table set, she returned to Zylphia and whispered softly in her true friend’s ear, “Make your peace now with your husband. Eat your evening meal at his table. Take what nourishment you can, for you will need your strength. But do not drink the porter. Not one drop.”
The housekeeper helped Zylphia to the table. Then she left the house.
The captain was so happy to see his wife alive that he ate a hearty meal and then drank heavily of the porter, filling himself with ideas of what he would buy his wife now that she had chosen to live.
When the convulsions began, his arms standing straight out by his sides, she sat wide-eyed and disbelieving. His head arched back until it almost touched the floor behind him. She stared as his body stiffened, then collapsed. She had no strength to move.
By the second round of convulsions, the housekeeper was at the door carrying clothes needed for travel and medicine to heal the sailor of his fever. “Come quickly,” she said.
Released from her nightmare, Zylphia followed the housekeeper out the door and down to the stolen dory. “Your true love is alive on the Miseries,” the housekeeper said. “Hurry on now, and do not look back.”
Zylphia, weak only moments before, now found the strength it took to row.
As she left the mouth of the harbor, she passed the Friendship, just hoisting sail and making ready to head out to sea. She passed one of the smaller fishing boats coming into port. She looked at neither but kept her eyes focused straight ahead, never taking them off the island where her true love waited…
15
MAUREEN’S MANUSCRIPT OF “THE ONCE” had never been completed. Though she wrote dozens of drafts with varied endings, she had never been able to finish the fairy tale. Maureen had re-created the legend as far as historical documentation would allow, but she had no idea where to go from there.
What she did know about the story was that the chief clerk at Derby Wharf had reported the missing dory to the Salem authorities. It was found days later and returned by a ship heading into port after dropping off sick sailors on the Miseries. Its thole pins (or oarlocks) were worn down and ruined from the long row. No sign of either Zylphia Browne or her young lover was ever seen again.
Maureen’s own belief in The Great Love would dictate a happy ending, but she could not seem to find the happily-ever-after for the fairy tale she was writing. The reason was simple. Partway into the story, Maureen had decided that the only suitable escape for the star-crossed lovers was aboard the Friendship, not the re-creation of the tall ship that sat at Derby Wharf these days, the one the tourists lined up to see, but the ship that had sailed out of Salem during the early 1800s.
Maureen had done significant research and had discovered that the young sailor of her story had originally been part of the Friendship’s crew. But the problem was that, on the very voyage in which the Friendship might have been instrumental in carrying the star-crossed lovers to their happily-ever-after, the ship was captured by the British in the recently declared War of 1812. There was certainly no record of the young woman, who would most probably have tried to disguise herself as a man or, barring that, as a cabin boy, in order to safely make this voyage with a predominantly male crew. A woman’s passage as anything but a captain’s wife was not only considered unlucky but dangerous for her as well. Yet when Maureen searched the records of the Friendship, she was unable to find any mention of either the young man who had sailed earlier aboard the ship or, had he decided to travel under a different identity, of any new names on the ship’s register.
That the young woman, Zylphia Browne, had escaped her home and her abusive husband was a matter of public record. Whether or not she had poisoned her husband was speculation. The captain, who was known for his brutality, had many enemies. It was well documented that he had been poisoned with a substance that was most likely brought back on one of his own ships and that his death was as painful as the beatings he’d been known to inflict not only on his crew but on his servants and his wife.