Max sold the Rubber Duck out of the hydrography department and bought a science research vessel he found in Woods Hole named Boogie Woogie. The oceanography department used it for salinity and current tracking, recreational fishing, and (unofficially) for parties. Six months after Max and I became lovers I was along on a party-boat ride on the Boogie Woogie to celebrate Charlie Healey getting a paper published in Scientific American magazine. His subject was MIBs—messages in bottles—which everybody had told him was not only an unpublishable topic but an embarrassing one for a serious researcher. After three or four beers, Charlie cornered me and repeated most of the article verbatim. I’d been the only one at the party who hadn’t glided out of his path when he’d come at them, so I learned that the American, British, and German navies had been tossing MIBs into the ocean for more than a hundred years, using them to track currents—the first human-made drifters to bob along the entire Northwest Passage. “Cast thy bread upon the waters, for thou shalt find it after many days,” Charlie said drunkenly, poking me in the shoulder with the hand that wasn’t holding a beer. “Ecclesiastes. Biblical flotsamology.” He told me about an alcoholic preacher named George Phillips who put anti-drinking sermons into forty thousand bottles and pitched them into the Pacific. They reached Mexico, New Guinea, Australia. Fifteen hundred people who’d found them wrote to Phillips—lots of them promising to stop drinking. Those sermons inspired a Capt. Walter Bindt to start throwing bottles that he called Gospel Bombs anywhere he sailed—sometimes fifteen hundred of them in a single voyage. Then he told me Daisy Alexander’s story.
“Daisy was a Singer Sewing Machine heiress who moved to London and started putting messages in bottles and tossing them into the Thames. When she died, nobody could find her will. That’s because it was in a bottle. Twelve years later a newly bankrupt restaurant owner named Jack Wurm was walking on a beach in San Francisco, wondering if he should kill himself. He found the bottle, broke it open, and unfolded Daisy Alexander’s will. It said, ‘To avoid all confusion, I leave my entire estate to the lucky person who finds this bottle and to my attorney, Barry Cohen, share and share alike. Daisy Alexander, June 20, 1937.’ The estate was worth twelve million dollars. The Singer family challenged the will in court and lost. Doesn’t that make you feel better about the way the universe works?” Charlie laughed. “Isn’t the universe wonderful and weird?”
Yes, I thought. It could be.
“All you have to do is bend over and pick up the bottle!” he went on.
I turned to Max, who was behind me listening to somebody going on about harmonics and the music of the gyres. I said, “Max, will you marry me?”
THE PIRATE LOVER
Pirate Wedding
The enemy of my enemy is my friend, they say, and oh how many enemies Judge Henri Le Cherche had made in his short and brutal life. News of the battle between the brothers spread from the closer shores to the villages, the towns, and the cities where the judge had acted directly or through his many layers of subordinates to have his way: sexually, legally, financially. He had ruined countless lives, and now that the judge was dead and far beyond revenge they closed ranks against him and appeared in courts to say that Basil Le Cherche—a man holding a letter of marque and no pirate at all but a noble servant of his country—had been attacked by his brother Judge Henri Le Cherche’s forces, who sought to take his prizes for themselves. Thief! Thief and whoremaster, they cried, for the women who had followed Electra Gates up and out of the darkness of their prison appeared also in those courts, dressed demurely with their hair bound modestly, describing Henri Le Cherche as a monster who had essentially purchased them into slavery.
Invitations came cautiously, and then in a rushing stream. Society waited and gauged its response against its most powerful members and when one of the royal family requested Basil Le Cherche’s presence at a ball in his honor, all Paris opened its doors to him. He declined the invitations. They had not invited Electra Gates, whose status was much more vulnerable to scandal than any man’s—and he would go to no palace, nor any hovel, that did not welcome her.
“You know they will not invite a woman whose presence could compromise their wives’ reputations,” she said to him. “You are a hero, but I, I am consort to an adventurer—I am fallen.”
“I will force the issue!” he cried. “Every door in society must open to you, or I will seclude myself!”
She laughed. “Basil, do you think I care what the bejeweled harpies of society do or think? You should move about freely if you choose—but I am free to avoid the world, and I treasure that freedom. You must accept these invitations and remain in the world. You have shipyard managers to bribe if you are ever to set sail again, politicians you must encourage to sign the documents that make you free to go where you will. Remember that you have men to help or hinder. Be sure that if I wished to go somewhere, do something or be something, I would see it done. I will go where I wish, or not. You need clear no way for me.”
How could any man or woman resist her? he thought. This woman who only a few months ago had been an obedient girl—an offering on the table of the season’s balls, something set on her mother’s hook to cast into pools of wealthy men. That young woman was gone, and here in her place was a creature who could embrace both battle and lovemaking, and the only opinion in the world besides her own that swayed her was his—because he was hers, chosen with the full freedom of her heart and soul, given to him with the surging fullness of her own desires.
“I do what you will me to do,” he told her. “But know that I will brook no disrespect towards you—anywhere from anyone.”
“Their opinion does not move me and it should not concern you, Basil. We are not of their kind, and will be gone from them soon. We have a ship. Two hours in Shelmerston’s port and you can put together the best crew afloat. And then, perhaps the West Indies. The Sargasso. Spain.”
He laughed. “Say the word, little witch,” he said, “and we set our sails to please you.”
“We will circle the Earth together, Basil Le Cherche. We will be each other’s world, complete unto ourselves.”
He pulled her into his arms. “If you say so, Electra Gates,” he said, “it shall be.”
In the next weeks no visitors but Madame de Lac came to the rooms she and Basil had taken while the Cat was being refitted. Electra had not seen Madame de Lac since the night of the ball, but she was not surprised to see her card. She told Trotter to admit her. Madame de Lac had never had much interest in the moral issues that any sexual affair presented, and Electra’s ostracization from polite society meant nothing to her. She was married, wealthy, and, perhaps most important, she knew the secrets of virtually anyone in Paris or London who could harm her. They would have nothing to say to her visiting a fallen woman.
“You are a fool, Mademoiselle Gates, but I understand. I too was a fool for the briefest time. A little window that closed before I could leap through.”
“You refer to my relationship with Basil Le Cherche?”
“Of course.”
“And what was this little window? The one you declined to leap through?”
“I loved someone once. I let him go.”
“Are you saying that you regret it, Madame de Lac?”
“Do you serve tea in this house, Mademoiselle Gates? I long for one of those cinnamon cookies from the new shop that everyone is raving about.”