The Deep

by Alma Katsu

  She could feel the pain of his circumstances, as if they’d been splashed over her as she passed him by. She could feel it because it had been her own, too. She still remembered the first woman who had broken her heart. Still remembered the terrifying urgency of the way they had kissed, the secrecy of every touch, of every thought.

  It was surreally cruel—or it could be. You had to learn to navigate it. To sail slightly above it. To use men—husbands, business owners, the true controllers of society—to your benefit, to rise high enough that they couldn’t hurt you there. Once you were high enough in it, you were safe. And then you could worry about your secrets in peace.

  But there were other secrets she had to protect now, ones that made her past heartaches seem juvenile and sweet. Harmless. No—what she had to hide now was black as a starless city night and carried the scent of ash on its breath.

  As soon as she got to her cabin, the first thing she would do, she resolved, would be to go through the sheaf of letters waiting for her review, letters from a solicitor who was helping her locate a new factory. He was to meet her at the hotel the day after they arrived in New York to start showing her properties.

  She’d chosen to see the fire that had destroyed her business in London as an omen. Rather than let the tragedy ruin her—she’d lost not only her supplies and stock but all the seamstresses and pattern cutters trapped inside—she decided to view it as an opportunity. Fate’s way of telling her to look to America. It certainly was a bigger market than England. Word was there was a surplus of talented seamstresses there, immigrants flooding into the country not only from Ireland and England but Italy and Poland, too. More coming each week. Labor to replace all the workers she’d lost.

  Plus, she could put all the bad press behind her. Let the solicitors and insurance men sort it out. Lucile Ltd. would carry a certain panache in New York City, rather than the taint of scandal.

  Not that she was being blamed in London for the fire. There had not even been a hint of such a thing at the inquiry. It had been an old building but not decrepit. Not a firetrap. It had not been a workhouse, for goodness’ sake.

  The factory was where the sewing was done. Lady Duff-Gordon, when she went to work at all, went to the salon on Hanover Square where she met clients, her rich and titled friends. She chatted with them while mannequins walked about, wearing the current line. She could barely remember setting foot in the factory, though she was sure she had at some point.

  That was why the incident haunted her. Guilt. Had she been negligent? She should’ve been there more frequently. If she had, who knows . . . maybe she would’ve noticed something. Not that she blamed the factory’s manager: an overseer would never suggest to an owner that she ought to spend good money to spruce up a factory or warehouse. If she’d been more involved, she might’ve made a difference.

  Then all those sweet girls wouldn’t have died.

  The memorial services had been written up in the papers for days, followed by angry letters about the shameful treatment of the working poor. Soapbox anarchists railed against the upper classes and exploitation of the masses. People in the streets wore black armbands in solidarity with the families.

  She pushed these thoughts away.

  One girl had survived, the only one to survive. Lillian Notting. She would’ve died that day if Lady Duff-Gordon herself hadn’t sent her to deliver a dress to a client. She liked the women who did the final fitting with customers to be pretty. It made the right impression. Only the prettiest women were selected for the job. Lady Duff-Gordon had spied Lillian Notting at the salon one day, sent from the factory to deliver a sample dress for a particularly demanding client. The girl had shown up, hugging the dress box to her chest, all out of breath, disheveled black hair falling out from her hat, the apples of color bright on her cheeks, and Lady Duff-Gordon knew right away that the girl was wasted in the factory, no matter how good her needlework. She remembered, too, the slight pang of desire for the pretty young girl. Maybe she would invite her to the house one day for tea to ask about her aspirations. Lady Duff-Gordon did that sometimes, in order to make a harmless offer. Come work more closely with me. You may see your fortunes rise. Sometimes it led to good things—for both Lucy and the girl. And Cosmo never minded.

  To each their own.

  Lady Duff-Gordon recalled with a jolt that Lillian Notting had been delivering a dress to Caroline Fletcher that day, the same Caroline Fletcher who was on this ship. Lady Duff-Gordon forgave herself the slip: it had been Caroline Sinclair at the time, the young widow not yet remarried. She even remembered the dress: blue silk, a peculiar shade of hyacinth that Caroline had insisted on. Why had she not remembered Caroline earlier? Caroline hadn’t mentioned it, perhaps not knowing that Lady Duff-Gordon was the Lucy of Lucile Ltd. A shiver ran through her, like someone had walked on her grave. It was not a good coincidence, a favorable coincidence. Stead, the old fool, was right about one thing: there were spirits of the dead, and they were everywhere. They hung about, an invisible smoke.

  A draft slithered over her shoulders and through the silk of her dress. Her thoughts had made her cold. As soon as she was settled, she’d order chamomile tea to warm her up—and calm her down.

  The ship lurched suddenly underfoot, and she almost slipped. She had gotten used to the ship’s lumbering rhythm after the first day and almost didn’t notice anymore. Only when the sea got a little rougher, like tonight.

  Lady Duff-Gordon was surprised to see a silhouette in the window of the door at the end of the alleyway, a door that led to the promenade. It looked like a woman was out on the deck. At this hour in the evening, however, that was impossible. Besides, it was freezing outside, the temperature dropping steadily all day.

  Lady Duff-Gordon passed her stateroom and continued toward the door. Perhaps the door had jammed and the poor woman couldn’t get back inside . . . Maybe she’d panicked and didn’t think to look for another way in. She would freeze in no time out there. Lady Duff-Gordon couldn’t bear the thought of another woman dying, not if she could do something about it this time. She started jogging, lifting the hem of her gown to keep from tripping.

  She got to the door, reached for the handle—and froze.

  It was dark and the lights in the hall were dim, but now that she was close, Lucy could see the woman and she didn’t look like she belonged in first class. This woman was disfigured. She was a ghastly sight. She looked as though she had been clawing at her own face. A gash, a wicked thing made by a knife or razor, ran diagonally from one eyebrow and over the bridge of her nose and on to open one cheek. With growing horror, Lady Duff-Gordon realized she looked like an escapee from an asylum. Her head was shorn, the hair raggedly hacked off. Her eyes smoldered like burning embers.

  Most disturbing, she looked slightly familiar.

  Lady Duff-Gordon pulled her hand back. She couldn’t let a madwoman—if that’s what she was—loose in first class. Maybe the poor thing had wandered above deck from steerage—what other explanation could there be?—but that didn’t mean Lady Duff-Gordon could allow her access to the first-class cabins.

  Still . . . mad or not, the woman would freeze if Lady Duff-Gordon didn’t let her in.

  She wished there was someone else in the hall, someone she could ask for help, but she was alone.

  No—she couldn’t let this woman die. Her conscience throbbed like an open wound.

  After one more second’s hesitation, Lady Duff-Gordon pushed the door open (noticing not the slightest sign of sticking) and stepped onto the deck.

  But where had she gone? The woman had vanished. Lady Duff-Gordon looked left, then right, her vision not going far in the blackness. Her breath rose in a ghostly white plume before her face.

  Without warning, a hand clamped over her mouth.

  She started, but another hand dug into her upper arm.

  “Shush,” a man whispered in her ear. “Don’t
move. You’ll scare her away.”

  It was Mr. Stead, the strange old man, the occultist. She nodded and Stead removed his hand from her mouth. His hand was covered with ink stains as though he’d been scribbling for hours. “You see her, too?”

  “The spirit.”

  Lucy felt herself shaking.

  “Bah. She’s gone now,” he said, looking bewildered and upset—sad, even.

  She glanced around them, but there was nothing but the darkness, the rush of wind, the night wrapping around their great ship, and the pinpricks of stars, far above it all, blinking and cold.

  The water was a froth around her head, a swirl of bubbles, rushing and flowing all around her. Water buffeted her in all directions. Water never stood still, was never dormant, was never satisfied. Water was always rushing somewhere and everywhere.

  With the water came the voices, carried far and wide.

  * * *

  —

  You don’t understand, dear: he lost the business. He says he was forced out by those terrible Standard Oil fellows. How could you not have heard about it? It’s been in all the papers. . . .

  She’s gone and gotten herself pregnant. Ruined her life, and for what? Anyone could see his intentions were not honorable. I don’t know what we’ll do if the neighbors ever find out. . . .

  His prospects are better in America, he says. There’s no work here. He’ll send for us when he’s gotten established. No, I don’t like it, but what can I do. . . .

  Bubbles brushed her cheeks, lifted her hair, carried it—long and black and flowing, like seaweed—on the tide. She turned her head away, but she could still hear them. You could never escape the voices.

  I don’t want to spend the rest of my life as a maid. . . .

  You’re fooling yourself if you think it’ll be any better. . . .

  They never learned, it seemed. Never changed. You couldn’t save them from themselves. The best you could hope for was to save a few—the young, the willing. The innocent.

  1916

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  19 November 1916

  HMHS Britannic

  Even at night, the ward is no place for a man to think.

  The beds are mostly empty as Britannic is steaming toward Mudros, where—he has been told—it will take on the majority of its patients. The patients who came aboard with Mark in Naples have been situated together to make it easier for the nurses and orderlies, and when he’d been placed among them, Mark found he was surrounded by men for whom sleep is painful. He’d lain on his cot, listening to them whimper and gnash their teeth, plagued by bad dreams. Some mumbled as though in conversation. Others thrashed, fighting enemies left behind on distant shores. Now, in the smaller, more private room, there are only the cries of one lone patient to contend with.

  Beside his own.

  It’s the exhaustion that has mostly kept him bedbound. He’s mobile, though, capable of walking about with the use of a cane, though Nurse Jennings prefers he not do it alone. He cannot lie still any longer, not when every time he closes his eyes, he fears opening them again, fears seeing that eerily familiar pale face hovering above his. Those strangely vacant, searching eyes. No matter that it is night—night and day have become the same to him anyway. He rises, puts on his drab, military-issue dressing gown, and reaches for his cane, the feel of it glossy and foreign in his hand.

  The dining hall is sparsely populated with others who have also given up on sleep, mostly men sitting by themselves in the dark. One man reads under an electric light, the single bulb casting him in a shaft of light. A quartet plays a serious hand of cards at a far table. In the old days, he would’ve itched to join them, but nowadays the sight of a deck of cards turns his stomach.

  He chooses a chair and sits in the dark, fingering the top of his cane like he’s nursing an old grievance. Annie Hebbley is still alive. Seeing her has released a flood of memories that he had painstakingly packed away. He had woken up in that hospital in New York after the Titanic’s sinking to be told that he’d lost the only two people in the world who mattered to him: Caroline and Ondine. It had taken months—years, really—to claw his way back from that. At first, he didn’t want to bother. Madness or suicide seemed infinitely easier and less painful than trying to find a way to go on.

  It was only after nearly half a year of distance that he could face the Titanic’s list of the dead, checking to see who among the people he’d met on board were no more. He was shocked at how many had perished—especially the wealthy Americans, clinging to some notion of chivalry that seemed to have escaped the British aristocrats who’d managed to find a seat in a lifeboat, like Sir Duff-Gordon and J. Bruce Ismay. Cosmo Duff-Gordon appeared to be in trouble for escaping in one of the lifeboats, and subsequently offering the crewman bribes to row away from the foundering wreck. Serves him right, Mark thought. Better men—Astor, Guggenheim, Stead—were missing and presumed dead. Months and years of inquiries and lawsuits were still to come.

  He counted himself among this unholy lot of cowards. He heard the story of his rescue after he’d regained consciousness, how he’d been fished out of the frigid waters adrift, his life belt not yet waterlogged. He’d bobbled close to one of the lifeboats that had been sent off not close to full, and one of the occupants harangued the others into bringing him in. His life since the sinking has been one long nightmare, starting when he woke in a New York City hospital. They’d had to amputate several of his toes, but he was told he was extraordinarily lucky: few men had been pulled out of those frigid waters alive. He’d been unconscious for days. By the time he woke, the entire world had learned about the great tragedy at sea. Titanic survivors were being feted around town, made to give speeches, written up in the newspapers.

  He wished he could track down that good Samaritan and tell her she shouldn’t have bothered: there wasn’t a less deserving man on that ship. She should’ve saved her good deed for old man Stead, or somebody who’d done an ounce of good in his life. She’d wasted it on him.

  Finding out that he’d lived when his wife and child had died only made it worse.

  He had one thing to be grateful for: Lillian’s journal had survived. His hand went to his breast pocket, where he always kept it. Somehow it survived the hours in the sea after the Titanic, as though it was meant to be. As though Lillian’s memory was meant to survive long after everything else fell away. The dried pages of the journal crinkled softly under the press of his hand. There, there.

  For a long time, he hadn’t been able to accept the news, especially concerning Ondine. He wanted to believe that she was still alive, that she had been rescued but that the authorities, with no clue to her identity, handed her over to a foundlings’ society or orphanage. She might still be in some cheerless institution, raised without love, like a child in one of Mr. Dickens’s sad stories. Or maybe she had been adopted, raised to believe she was someone else, never told about the Titanic connection, the adoptive parents waiting until she was grown and better equipped to handle the tragic truth. If she were alive, she would be four now. After a time, he started to realize that when he imagined his daughter alive, he pictured her like Lillian, a gorgeous child as radiant as the sun, but with hair dark and reckless, tangled and wild.

  He had become an imposter in his own life, in his own skin. His former self had died a long time ago—perhaps before he’d even set foot on the ship. He didn’t know who he’d become. Maybe he was a ghost, and this was all a version of purgatory.

  He didn’t bother informing Caroline’s family of their marriage. What would have been the point? When the ship’s manifest was questioned—after all, he and Caroline had been registered as man and wife—Mark swore to Caroline’s grieving father than it was a clerical error, that he’d never met his daughter. Mark wanted no part of Caroline’s fortune and had no interest in ruining a father’s memories of his beloved dead daughter. She belonged to her father; Ma
rk wasn’t sure, in retrospect, that he’d ever really known her at all.

  Eventually, Mark stomached the overseas journey so he could come home to London, where he hid in his dark little apartment until the war broke out. It had, strangely, been a kind of relief. The idea of the world ripping itself apart—as if everyone had gone mad. It made him feel less alone. Perhaps the world had always been a cruel, savage place, and now, at least, the truth was out in the open. It no longer needed to be his own private misery, a dark secret eating him from the inside.

  Besides, the idea of joining the war effort appealed to him: he’d just as soon die on a battlefield as go slowly mad in his bitterness and solitude. Maybe on the muddy fields of the Balkans or in the hills of Gallipoli, he could reclaim his honor.

  In the four years since the Titanic, Mark had managed to whittle his life down to almost nothing: a two-room flat, days spent as a clerk in an accounting house, nights pacing the floor or out walking until he was exhausted and could fall asleep. Sundays were his day of penance, when he would go to various cemeteries and sit before graves that served as substitutes for the watery resting places of Lillian, Caroline, and Ondine.

  How did his life come to this, a near hermit, miserable and alone? He thinks back to the happiest time of his life, the months after Ondine’s birth when he and Lillian lived with Caroline. An unconventional life to be sure, and constrained: he could tell no one about it at the time. But he’d trade anything to have those days back again.

  He makes his way around the ship, heading back to his hard, narrow cot. His progress is slowed by the cane, especially on the steep stairwells. The sound of his footsteps and the thump of the cane seem disproportionately loud in the still of night, and he feels like a monster in a nightmare chasing down a frightened child. He looks into the patients’ ward, expecting to see Annie. He hasn’t seen her anywhere: not in the halls, not in the wards. She is nowhere to be found, a thought that is hauntingly familiar. He’s been in this very position once.