by Alma Katsu
At least, she thinks they are memories. Sometimes she can’t distinguish between her actual childhood, ancient fairy tales told by Grandmother Aisling and spontaneous fantasy, morphing, fleeting, and strange.
In these memories, a girl wears a muslin dress and thick wool sweater and sprints through the rain, out to the vast bluffs overlooking the Irish Sea, the air cold and stinging on young skin. But the memories bleed together, and then she is a young woman, dancing in the noisy, crowded streets of London, nearly knocking over a stand of roasting chestnuts as she laughs, turning her face to the sky, opening her mouth to the rain made bitter by coal smoke. Then both become a third—a girl who is part seal, part human, her body undulating with the curves of the tide as she swims toward the surface, rain pelting it like bullets. She transforms: the slickness of her animal hide becoming the tenderness of a child’s flesh, and two legs frantically kicking as she breaks the crest of a wave and comes up, heaving her first human breath.
Beside Annie, a man gasps for air. She swivels away from the window and the rain, dashing to the side of the nearest bed, where a patient appears to be suffocating, something in his throat seizing.
He’s an older man, with white mixed in his hair and in the bristles on his face. His eyes have gone round and wide with fear. Annie tries to help him sit up—Is he choking on something?—and within seconds is joined by a nurse and doctor on the shift. Quickly and efficiently, the doctor checks the man’s eyes, looks into his mouth, and feels at his neck for his pulse before declaring the man is fine.
“It’s just a panic attack,” the doctor says to Annie as they step away from the bed to confer. “I’ll give him a dose of morphine. Keep an eye on him until he falls asleep.”
Annie tidies up the area around his cot waiting for his eyelids to begin to sag, but a few minutes pass and there’s no sign that he’s getting sleepy. Is it possible to be immune to morphine? She could ask the doctor for another dose, but he and the nurse are busy attending to a much more serious case on the other side of the ward and she hates to bother them.
“I don’t mean to be such a baby,” the man says sheepishly. He nods in the direction of the windows. “It’s just that I’m afraid of the sea. I don’t travel by boat if I can help it, but the military don’t ask you your druthers. I never did learn to swim. And it looks like we could go under any minute, doesn’t it?”
The gray ocean outside the windows looks particularly bad, indeed. She can understand why anyone would be afraid of it.
“Don’t worry. You’re perfectly safe. This is the Britannic, sister ship to the Titanic—”
The man brays like a donkey, cutting her off. “And that’s supposed to make me feel better? We know how that turned out, don’t we?”
“This ship is different. Better. They changed things, based on what they learned from the sinking,” she says. She hopes that is not too inaccurate. She’s not sure what White Star Line may or may not have done; as the story went, they blamed the iceberg more than the ship’s inadequacies, its too-few lifeboats and disregard for safety precautions. The jammed wire signals. A million theories had flown about over the last few years and she’d lost track.
She squints at the man’s sunburned skin, the patches across his nose that look like freckles trying to reassert themselves on fresh skin. “Irish, are you? Then you know the story of the dubheasa.” He furrows his brows at her. “Never heard of the dubheasa?” she says, the Irish pronunciation—deh vah sah—easily tripping along her tongue like her grandmother had always said it. “Didn’t your nan tell you these stories? The dubheasa looks out for all the sailors and men at sea.” That’s not the whole story, but she doesn’t want to frighten him further, and he doesn’t seem to have heard of the one thing that everyone in Ballintoy is taught to respect and fear practically from birth. “Don’t worry—as long as you’ve been good, she will save you, should you ever need it.” She smiles at him so hard her cheeks ache. “And you seem like a good man.”
He looks at her doubtfully. “I don’t know about that, my dear. I was fighting in a war, after all.”
But he does seem to be comforted, and finally, the old man falls back to sleep. With the shift change, Annie is free to go on her breakfast break. She walks down to the dining hall, where she takes a bowl of porridge out of habit and sits down beside Violet at one of the long, unadorned tables, staring at the slop with no real appetite. Some mornings, she can hardly recall what it is to feel hunger, as if in the night she has forgotten.
“And he couldn’t get out?” Violet is asking the radio man—Charlie Epping.
Charlie nods. He’s straddling the bench on the opposite side of the table, one elbow propped beside his fork, gesturing with a coffee mug in the other. “Apparently he’d been knocking for the better part of three hours. Bastard was bloody lucky Mortimer happened by and heard him—could’ve starved to death in the supply closet, and what a way to go, eh?”
“Who could’ve starved?” Annie asks as she stirs the contents of her bowl.
Charles leans toward her, conspiratorially. “One of the orderlies. Stanley White. First, a whole tray of scalpels goes missing from the operating theater, and then, when he goes to replenish them—”
“He walks into the supply room and the door locks behind him!” Violet finishes. “No one realized he was gone!”
Another orderly, sitting at Epping’s far side, pipes in, “It was no accident, that. You gotta know this lady’s haunted.” He gestures at the air, suggesting he means the whole ship.
Violet laughs. When she laughs, she puts Annie in mind of the perfect Irish lass, with her thick auburn hair and smiling gray-blue eyes. A sweet, bonny lass who is always up for fun. “Naw, I wouldn’t go that far and you best be careful with that kind of talk. The captain wouldn’t like to hear it, for sure.” But Annie didn’t miss the quick look Violet threw her way first.
Annie swallows, unable to eat her breakfast. This isn’t the first rumor of a ghost, which she now knows must be standard fare. Aren’t there stories attached to every large ship, every mansion, every deep and dark wood? Just yesterday, one of the firemen swore he saw a man in a tuxedo walking down the alleyway toward him, only to disappear into thin air just as they would have collided. Said he could swear he felt the air chill as he passed through him and was gone. Claimed he could still smell cigar in the alleyway.
Then again, Annie knew plenty of the crew hung out in the alleyways at night, passing around a cigar, sharing a bit of comfort, so that’s probably what accounted for the smell.
“Well, some of the patients are no longer in possession of their faculties,” Violet had reminded Annie last night when she brought it up before they went to bed. “It’s no surprise they’re hearing and seeing things. So long as it’s only the patients and not the rest of us, there’s nothing to fear,” she added, clearly intending it to be a joke. But she must have realized the hidden insult—Annie had, up until less than a week ago, been living in an asylum, after all. Violet clamped her mouth shut with a small smile.
She is not mad.
But there is something in her that is hospitable to madness.
Now, before Annie can find her words, Violet turns toward her, clearly wanting to change the subject. She gently touches the brooch pinned to Annie’s pinafore. “Ooh! That’s a lovely one. Have I seen it before?”
Annie fingers it. A tiny gold heart dangling from an arrow. Heat forms in her cheeks—the embarrassment of being paid attention.
Violet apparently sees her silence for coyness because she winks at Epping and the other orderly. “Must’ve been a gift from someone special.”
Now Annie can feel her blush deepen.
“Ha! I knew it. It’s not the kind of piece a woman buys for herself, and I should know because have I ever told you about . . .” And then Violet’s off on another story of an admirer on one transatlantic crossing who’d taken a liking t
o her and offered her his mother’s favorite bracelet, but Annie loses the thread, still touching her brooch and keeping her eyes tilted downward.
Why had she worn the brooch today? Perhaps she’d just needed a little reminder of who she was.
Like a small gold anchor.
Only now instead it makes her feel exposed and vulnerable, a blazing scarlet letter on her chest, like something out of a forbidden novel. She looks up to see Charles Epping eyeing her, an amused look tossing across his boyish face. She smiles back, and the heat moves down from her face to her chest and her abdomen. A man looking at her like that has always felt like fire—part comfort and warmth, part danger.
There is something uncanny in the feeling, in the way he looks at her. In all the stories of hauntings. In the whole spirit of this ship. In the memories that continually rise around her like a dark tide.
Something terrifying, some buried, rotting truth that wiggles its way into the core of her, like maggots eating a carcass.
With that thought, she cannot bear to choke down her porridge, so she gets up and clears her tray.
* * *
Rain pelts down hard as the hospital ship pulls into Naples that afternoon. Annie comes out onto the deck with a handful of nurses, everyone eager for land after five days at sea. The town that sprawls beyond the harbor looks dirty and squalid; the rain has painted all the buildings in muddy browns and sodden grays, dark alleys slanting down the hillside, veining the city. On the docks, packs of children dressed in tatters run from ship to ship, begging for coins or food.
Charlie told her they were stopping to take on coal and water, but looking over the side, Annie spots a caravan of men and stretchers approaching the gangplank. They will be taking on wounded, too, then.
With war raging across the continent, this strategic port town is overstuffed with troops. The base’s hospital is likely overrun with casualties. Apparently, they weren’t looking to miss the opportunity to off-load their worst cases.
Annie huddles under her cloak, playing the Vanishing Game in her head—I am here; I am not here—as she waits for Sister Merrick, the head nurse, to decide where each patient will go and which nurse will escort the man down to his appointed ward. The parade hobbles up to Merrick one at a time, a long line dressed in mud brown and olive drab to match the streets from which they’ve emerged. Many are on crutches, some strapped to a stretcher. All have the unanimated faces of the shell-shocked, half ghost.
It always jolts Annie, the smells. In the trenches, the men have sometimes spent days—even weeks—surrounded by their own feces, rampant rats, and the remains of their dead comrades. Many of their wounds are so deep, and already festering with bits of shrapnel and filth that nothing can be done but hold them down as they scream, as their fevers rise.
“This one to D ward,” Merrick says to Annie. She points at the man on the stretcher as though Annie is a field dog and expected to trot out smartly on command. Merrick acts as though she is the headmistress at a girls’ school and her nurses are obedient students.
Annie is glad to bend to the head nurse’s iron will. Obedience is something that has always come easily to her. Almost always.
She gives Merrick a curt little nod and mutters, “This way, please,” to the orderlies carrying the stretcher.
She is sad, though, to get out of the cold rain, which reminds her so of a time before, when she was whole and young and altogether different. Rain’s always done that to her when it touches her skin. Like the kiss of the sea.
Her gaze alights briefly on the face of the next man in line and in that sliver of a second, she thinks she recognizes him. There is something familiar about his face.
No. It is nothing more than longing. The same longing that made her see Mark’s face on the journey to Southampton from Liverpool, that made her see his face in train stations and on street corners.
They’re only taking a handful of men on board, but they’re Annie’s first actual patients and now she has an idea of what it will be like when they dock in Mudros in a few days’ time and she is surrounded by wounded. She imagines it will not be unlike when she was a stewardess with more than a dozen passengers to take care of.
Out of the rain and settled into the wards, some of the men become more animated. A few even joke with the nurses, ask when the tea cart comes around. The patient on the stretcher whom Annie has been escorting is a young man with the fair skin of the English, spangled with golden freckles. His eyes are open, but he stares past her. When she undoes the straps and strips back the blanket, she sees that he is missing both legs below the knee. She bends to help him onto a cot, struggling to get both her arms underneath him without jostling him too badly. She’s learned the hard way that often even those who don’t seem to be in pain may cry out in agony if you handle them too roughly. And something as simple as moving a man’s body from one surface to another can take an enormous amount of effort. She is breathless by the time she tucks his newly issued blanket up around his chest, making a note to reserve one of the ship’s wheelchairs for him.
“Water?” she asks, and when there is no answer she simply holds the glass to his lips, tilting it back until he takes a few sips. So, he is responsive, not catatonic.
She puts the water glass on the tiny stand beside the cot. “Do you need a bedpan? Would you like an extra blanket?” she asks patiently but gets no answer. She spreads the blanket over him and tucks the ends briskly under the edge of the mattress. “There you go, nice and cozy. . . . Please signal if you need anything, but a doctor should be with you shortly.”
The young man still says nothing, eyes downcast. “You’re safe now.” The words slip out in her desperation to comfort him. Perhaps to comfort herself, too. The ill feeling from this morning still clings to her, a shadow. “This is the HMHS Britannic. The largest, grandest hospital ship in the fleet. It’s unsinkable, you know.”
Nothing.
She stands and begins to move away. And then she sees the man that she mistook for Mark Fletcher across the room. Two orderlies lift the soldier from a stretcher and settle him into a bed.
Though she knows it’s foolish, heartache pulls her toward him. She wends her way through the wounded, pulled by some invisible force.
A nurse Annie doesn’t recognize stands between them now, tucking a blanket tightly over her patient.
“How is he?” Annie asks over the woman’s shoulder.
“Unconscious,” the nurse answers without turning around. “A head wound. They said he slipped into a coma yesterday, poor man.”
Finally, the nurse steps away, leaving Annie with him. Now she can study his face all she wants, to satisfy her curiosity and be assured that her eyes were playing tricks, that her fantasies have taken over once again, that—
She stares.
She stares for what feels like an hour but can only be seconds, wondering if another vision has come over her, something half memory, half dream.
But no.
It is him.
This man is Mark.
He looks like Mark but older, as Mark of course would be by now. Flecks of gray at his temples, the mouth more drawn, a few lines at the corners of his eyes, like delicate crackling on a vase, making it even more valuable for its fragility.
But there’s no denying.
A vibration of knowing moves through Annie’s body, even as other nurses bustle past her, ignoring her.
It’s him.
Mark has come to her.
Mark Fletcher has come back to her.
This—this was the purpose of everything. Why she knew she had to answer Violet’s letter, had to be here, on this ship, for this strange voyage with the dying.
Somehow, she willed this. Somehow, there was a silent call between them. Even after all this time. After everything. And now: here he lies. Half dead, but not dead.
And this time, he belong
s to no one else. He is alone.
He is hers.
1912
Chapter Twelve
11 April 1912
Queenstown, Ireland
Annie stood on the open deck, shivering under her cloak against the cold and damp. The stern was swathed in fog so dense that it dimmed the pale dawn light, so thick that she could barely make out the activity twenty feet in front of her. A clutch of bodies ahead, dark and indistinct, appeared and disappeared in the shifting white. They had to be servants; you couldn’t expect the Astors to be up at this hour, not for the burial of staff.
It was as though the sea were conspiring in this funeral for the dead boy by conjuring up the fog to hide him from prying eyes. Cosseting him in the softest blanket of cloud for his last journey.
Annie herself felt foggy headed. It was only the second day of the Titanic’s journey from Southampton to Cherbourg to Queenstown. After today’s final stop, it would just be open sea. According to the itinerary, they’d spend five more nights at sea before docking in New York, unless bad weather set them back. She’d had a poor night, unable to sleep after fetching Guggenheim and helping him find his physician, then leading them to the Astors’ stateroom. Violet had already been asleep, and, as much as Annie craved conversation, she hadn’t the heart to wake her. She tossed for what seemed like hours before falling asleep, only to be tormented with wild dreams—one in particular involved a man that she was certain was Mark Fletcher. While she could recall no particulars beyond the heat of someone’s breath against her skin, hands tracing her neck, it left her feeling shameful and burning.
She pulled her cloak tighter to her body.