by Alma Katsu
The door flew open, suddenly. Electric light fell like a dagger from the alleyway.
Anne Hebbley was in the doorway, drawn back like a frightened cat. “Good God, what is going on?”
Wind swept through the room, lashing the flames. Then—they were out, twisted plumes of smoke rising from the wicks. They were plunged into darkness, the only light spilling in from around Anne Hebbley’s form, silhouetting her.
Hebbley curtsied and Caroline’s eyes began to adapt to the darkness. “Begging your pardon, but Mrs. Astor’s lady’s maid, Miss Bidois, sent me to find Mrs. Astor and Mr. Guggenheim. I do apologize for the interruption, sir, but she asks if you might bring your physician to the Astors’ stateroom right away.”
The Astors exchanged looks, Madeleine’s hand going reflexively to her belly. Astor narrowed his eyes as though suspecting someone was playing a trick on him. “I don’t understand. . . . Surely whatever the problem, our presence is not necessary. Tell Miss Bidois she must handle it on her own—”
“It’s the boy,” Hebbley blurted out. Stead flicked on the lights at last, and there was terror in Miss Hebbley’s eyes, Caroline realized. “Miss Bidois said Teddy’s having a seizure. She’s afraid he might—”
There was a fluttering of white chiffon as Madeleine Astor leapt up from the table, followed by her husband as they dashed from the room.
Their cabin was only a few doors down, and yet Caroline couldn’t make herself follow, feeling fixed to her chair and unable to move.
Far away, a door opened. The sound of concerned murmurs leaked into the alleyway—a dream’s distance away. The rest of the Astors’ servants? The door must’ve been left open as Caroline heard Madeleine’s voice, then—the timbre if not her actual words, muddled as if through thick, undulating water. For a single moment, everything was quiet and still.
And then there was a scream. Madeleine Astor’s. A scream of such terror and sadness that Caroline had no doubt as to what had happened, even before she’d followed the sound, in an out-of-body rush, to the room and seen it for herself.
The little servant boy she’d seen running around the promenade earlier, no bigger than eight or nine, lay still on the floor, the coverlet from the Astors’ four-poster bed yanked partway onto the ground beside him, as though he’d tried to clutch at it to pull himself up but failed. A physician had two fingers to the boy’s neck and was staring at the rest of them with a distant look in his eyes. Out of habit, Caroline reached for her brooch but found it was gone. Instead, she did all she could think to do: she went to Madeleine and held her close. After all, the girl was only eighteen—practically a child, herself.
Chapter Nine
The cloying scent of incense hung in the air like a reproach. Stead would never get the smell out of his rooms tonight, but that disturbed him far less than the sight, just now, of that small boy askew on the floor of the Astors’ bedroom, where he must have no doubt sneaked to play. His eyes had been open, until the physician bent down to gently close the boy’s lids.
A seizure, the physician had determined, after hearing the accounts of the servants who’d witnessed it.
Stead pushed the porthole out as far as it would go. The air against his face was chilly and damp. Wisps of fog floated above the black water, looking like clouds. The clouds of heaven and a cold, brackish hell.
He turned his back on the porthole. The séance had been unsettling. He snatched the bread off the table and threw it out the porthole. He lost sight of it in the mist but was sure it had fallen into the ocean.
With any luck, the wraith would follow it down.
The electric lights filled his room with a bright yellow glow. He normally detested electric lights but was glad for them now.
He stood at the table and deliberately unfocused his eyes. He had seen enough tonight and would see no more. What had happened at the table? He had no doubt that it was supernatural—he had been attending séances for fifteen years, had seen bald fakery as well as the unexplainable—but struggled to make sense of what had transpired tonight. These smart society people had ridiculed him at dinner, but at the first sign of disturbance, to whom do they run? To him, of course. Then they wanted his help. Or at any rate, the young (far too young) Madeleine Astor had wanted it, and what Madeleine Astor wanted, she got.
As he cleared the table, he thought of calling for the Hebbley girl, the stewardess, for help—or perhaps just to distract him from the weight of this silence—but he could barely stand to be in her presence. That was the real reason he’d asked about getting a different steward for his cabin.
Though he could hardly admit it to himself, the girl reminded him of Eliza.
Which was ridiculous. He hadn’t seen Eliza Armstrong since The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon had come out in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885. She had been thirteen then, which meant she would be forty today.
Besides, Eliza and this Anne Hebbley looked nothing alike. And yet there was something about the stewardess that unsettled him. Made him feel sad and . . . guilty. Terribly guilty.
A guilt he was unable to escape. He thought he’d made his peace with that. Had served three months at Coldbath Prison for what was, he insisted to this day, an honest miscalculation. But apparently that was not enough.
Was the presence that had visited him this evening . . . Eliza?
That would mean she was dead. But the private investigator’s report had said otherwise. And it had to be right. Stead had staked everything on seeing her again, one last time. In America.
He pushed the idea away.
Besides, what possible connection would there have been between Eliza and the Astors’ servant boy?
No, what had happened to the boy was something else.
Guggenheim’s physician tried to argue it had been a fit of epilepsy following a delirium that had perhaps set in much earlier in the day, but Stead knew better.
A seizure was one of the most common signs.
There was no doubt in Stead’s mind: a demon was lurking on board this ship. While they’d all been distracted here in Stead’s room, attempting to reach out to the spirit, it had evaded them, had found the boy alone, lured him somewhere private, then swirled its ghostly fingers into the boy’s chest—had wound its way up until it was choking the child from the inside.
The boy had died, as if it had been fated to be so.
And the spirit was still among them—a spirit who wanted something badly, though it was still anyone’s guess what that could be.
Chapter Ten
Mark Fletcher had been in bed for an hour when his wife returned, but he hadn’t been sleeping.
He’d been thinking instead of that itch that traveled through his hands, that longing for a deck of cards, a room full of smoke, the momentary high of the risk. He’d been thinking of numbers in red and black, teasing him with their offerings of fortune or failure. Of watching the horses run at Epsom and Newcastle, all flash and thundering hooves. But there were also dogfights and cockfights in dirty London alleys. He’d even bet on ratcatchers in corner pubs on his more desperate days. But he’d given all that up.
Had given up, too, a respectable if underpaid barrister’s position so that he could be here now, embarking on something new, with her. With Caroline.
When she’d stormed out, he expected she’d be back before too long, but then the minutes became hours, and still Caroline hadn’t returned. He wasn’t angry, really; it was something else—restlessness, maybe, like his skin was too tight. Big as the ship was, full of a thousand mazelike hallways, they were stuck here on it. Not even a day into the journey and Mark was already sick of this ship, this overstuffed and bloated behemoth. Gilded, embellished, excessive in every way. Mark wasn’t used to such dizzying luxury. He found it obscene. An insult to the dignified grandeur of the ocean on which it rode.
Maybe that was all it was. His sensibilities were worn
raw.
When Caroline finally slipped into their bedroom, however, relief washed over him. He leaned back on his elbows to face her. “Where have you been? I was worried about you—afraid you’d gotten lost down one of those endless, twisting corridors, or . . .”
“I didn’t intend to be gone so long,” she said, pulling off her gloves. She started to undress, but he noticed that she was acting strangely. Distracted. “A terrible thing happened tonight. Maddie Astor’s little servant boy died.”
What does Astors’ servant have to do with you? he wanted to ask, but she looked so distant at that moment—like she was not in fact in their rooms but floating out in the water, in danger of drifting away into the night fog—that he couldn’t. “Is this the boy who almost fell overboard?” he said instead. “The one saved by that boxer?”
Caroline was still blank faced, as though she’d seen a ghost. “I suppose it’s the same one. He had some sort of seizure in his sleep. They called in a doctor, but . . . it was too late. I—I saw him, Mark.”
“Saw who?”
“The boy!”
“The child must have been ill from the start of the day and disoriented. That could explain it.” The near falling, then his death. Surely the two were connected, each too odd in their own right to be coincidences.
Caroline sighed, slipping a thin silk nightgown over her head in the darkness as he watched. “It was awful. He’s so young. His eyes looked very strange, clouded.”
A child dead. Mark felt like a bucket that had plunged down an empty well.
The gentle, almost ineffable sway of the ship suddenly seemed too much for him. Ever since having his own child, he’d noticed he’d gotten more sensitive to mortality—he used to be aware of it but brazenly so. Now it whispered to him, tapped his shoulder, and distracted him when things were quiet.
“I’m sorry,” he said to his wife. He didn’t know what for—for their fight, for his mulishness earlier, for the fact that she had encountered this terrible occurrence on her own without him there to help. For the fact that whatever she’d seen, she wouldn’t be able, now, to unsee it.
He reached for her as she came toward the bed; he was usually so drawn to her body but right now saw her as something soft and fragile, in need of protection.
“I’m sorry, too,” she whispered as his fingers grasped her wrist and drew her in. She sat on the bed with her back to him.
He ran his fingers down her exposed shoulder blades, so crisp and so perfect in the moonlight from the window. He kissed the shadow there, and felt her shiver. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, whispering it against her skin, stroking her arm.
He pulled her toward him, taking in her smells. The perfume she always wore but mixed now with briny ocean air. Cigar fumes. And something else: a smoky botanical he couldn’t place, though it reminded him of a man’s cologne.
His wife’s body always made him hungry, and now more than ever. The hollow in the small of her back. The perfection of her breasts, which filled him with a boyish awe.
That possessive layer of musk that shouldn’t be there, on her skin.
He began to kiss her neck, below the hairline. He loved her hair. Slowly, she responded, arching her back slightly and tilting her head, until finally she turned, and kissed him. The consolation of her return gave way to a sudden urgency—he had to have her. If he didn’t, she might slip away again, vanish forever. He had to hold her down, to keep her.
She gasped slightly as he grasped her thighs, pushing up the flimsy nightgown. She was on his lap now, her legs parted around his waist, but he turned her over onto her back, riding the wave of need that had possessed him. Her hips rose and he was holding her wrists over her head now and they were moaning, breathless, and it was all too fast, and she cried out—from pain or pleasure? He suddenly didn’t know. There were tears in her eyes. He kissed her cheek, pushing up inside her until he had finished with a kind of force that shook him.
“Shh,” she whispered, her voice trembling when it was over. “We could have woken the baby.”
He was still catching his breath. Had she felt the intensity between them just now, or had it all been in him? Usually he knew; usually he had a sense of her body, of the way it responded to his. But tonight everything was a sea, dark and inscrutable and strange. “The baby,” she was whispering.
“She’s asleep,” he assured her.
But Caroline rolled over onto her side and sat up. “Mark, why didn’t she wake up? We were too loud, we . . .”
She was agitated, hadn’t calmed down. He knew her nerves were sensitive. It was because of the boy, certainly. A terrible thing to have seen.
“I’ll check on her,” Mark said, partly to comfort her and partly to get out of the bed. He felt suddenly unsettled by her, by the way everything seemed to be unraveling spontaneously and inexplicably, without a moment’s notice—their marriage, the thin threads of intimacy he thought held them together. Something else was bothering Caroline tonight, besides the boy’s death.
He pulled on his sleeping pants and entered the connecting chamber. The entire room was quiet. There was not even the soft intake of breath he often heard in the nursery back in London. When he bent over Ondine’s crib, he saw that she had somehow wriggled under the blanket. Alarm rang through him. The blanket covered her face completely—no, it was in her mouth, like a gag.
He was yanking the blanket aside before he could even stop to think it—the baby wasn’t breathing.
Ondine was at his shoulder in a second and he was banging on her back and at last she cried out, waking up, and only then did his heart seem to start beating again. He was never so happy in his life to hear her cry. For that instant, everything else disappeared and all that mattered was this tiny being.
Had he imagined it? No, she’d been suffocating, he was sure. If they hadn’t thought to check on her . . .
He stood there with the baby in his arms—wailing in his ear—for several minutes, just breathing, feeling her hard little breaths, fear coursing through him. He thought he might sob. But she was okay. She was fine. They were all fine.
After he’d gotten over the dizziness of his brief panic, he brought her back to the bedroom.
“What was it?” Caroline asked on his return, but he didn’t answer, not wanting to alarm her.
He placed the baby in Caroline’s outstretched arms.
“Don’t cry now, everything’s all right,” she murmured, pressing her pinkie finger gently into the baby’s mouth. Ondine calmed, latching on to Caroline’s finger. A contented smile spread over Caroline’s lips. Then she began to sing a lullaby. Mark loved Caroline’s singing, untrained but sweet and pure.
He curled back into bed and lay on his side, an arm tucked under his head, beside his wife and child for some time as she sang and sang, the melody pouring into his ear like warm honey, soothing away the strangeness of the evening, melting down his momentary fear.
His eyes were soon too heavy to keep open. He was warm beneath the blanket. His mind drifted, floating on a raft in the middle of the ocean. Bobbing gently, rise and fall. Black water all around him. Rise and fall. Lapping at his arms, then his chest. Then up to his neck. Steadily rising until he was enveloped by it. The water touched him all over like the hands of a curious lover, but an unfamiliar one, a new mistress, whose ways he couldn’t yet anticipate.
But then the water slipped over his head and he was being pulled down, down, down. There was no getting away, but he didn’t want to, even as the hands came over his mouth.
Down into the inkiness he sank, Caroline’s beautiful voice falling further and further away, until it was nothing but a whisper.
At the bottom, where all was blackness and silence, waited Lillian, whom he never expected to see again. Lillian, whom he tried not to think about. Yet here she was, waiting for him, and he came to her with a final gasp of certainty.
&nb
sp; 1916
Chapter Eleven
17 November 1916
Naples, Italy
HMHS Britannic
One by one, Annie throws back the heavy curtains draping the massive windows all around the main ward, which had been the first-class dining salon on the Titanic. It takes her the better part of an hour to make her way around the entirety of the room, with all the patients who begin to wake up and call out to her, asking for things she can’t provide. Assurances of their fate. An extra dose of morphine. She’s not even allowed to have her hands on the wound dressings, for fear of infection, which makes the hours longer and more exhausting—this perpetual feeling of helplessness, even as she is put to work delivering breakfasts, spooning porridge and wiping mouths, emptying bedpans, changing sheets, spreading vinegar into the cracks in the floors to try to clean out the remains of blood or vomit or urine. And, above all, listening, until the stories and litanies run together, a constant murmur of fury and fear and pain.
It surprises Annie how quickly this new existence has become routine. It’s almost as though she’s back on the Titanic, as though the terrible tragedy and the past four years were only a long nightmare. The two ships are so much alike that the two experiences begin to meld into one. Here are the same long, broad passageways, the same layout so that she can make her way around almost effortlessly. The same ceaseless undulation underfoot as the ship slices through the waves. The same bracing salt air filling her lungs and blowing her hair about her ears. On the ship, she is in a waking hallucination that she never left the Titanic and that she has always been at sea. That the sea is her home.
Of course, the people and the circumstances are vastly different—and oddly, she prefers being on Britannic. She’d rather wait on patients than pernickety rich passengers.
She secures the tieback and moves on to the next curtain. Dust lifts into the air, swirling about in the dove-gray light of dawn at sea. Rain batters down hard on window glass. It has now been nearly five days aboard the Britannic, but the days have begun to run together the same way just now, memories blur by as she watches trails of water slide into one another, then streak away.