She had told him something about Fairburn. Theirs had been a romance, and a marriage, of the Great War—a relationship made of drugs and drink, danger and distance, horror and awful sadness held at arm’s length. Unlike the lovers of all of Nancy’s women friends, Sydney Fairbairn had survived the war. She said she had never forgiven him for that.
Spencer closed the booklet and slapped it against his leg. He looked up at his photograph of Whitney. Her eyes seemed to be studying him intently.
He would return to her, to Paris. He would succeed, somehow.
Third Officer Kees Witte heard voices behind him, calling his name. On hands and knees, he backed slowly and painfully out of the compartment in the bulkhead, sharp steel hard against his back. It occurred to him he had irrevocably soiled his uniform.
The face he looked up into was that of van Groot, fresh from a night’s sleep. His expression was more curious than angry, but his voice was very gruff.
“Kees, are you still on duty?”
Kees looked at his wristwatch. It had been more than three hours since he had left the bridge.
“I forgot the time.”
“We have been steaming at half speed. On your instructions. Not the captain’s. Or mine.”
“Sorry, sir. It was a precaution.”
“What in hell have you been doing?”
“Checking out electrical circuitry, sir. We had a fire alarm. It appeared to be false, but I wanted to make sure, after all the—”
“Kees, how many electricians do we have in this crew?”
“Six, sir. Well, five, with one in sick bay.”
“You left Poeder in command of this vessel.”
“He’s competent.”
Van Groot’s thick, dark eyebrows clenched together as he scowled. “Kees. Poeder had us six degrees off course to the north. Off course, in calm seas and clear skies.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I am going to put you on Schuur’s watch, as assistant.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I am going to inform the captain.”
“Yes, sir. Is the captain on the bridge, sir?”
“No. He is still asleep. It is just as well. He has been working hard, and this will be a long voyage.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
A shaky and roughly shaven Captain van der Heyden entered the first-class dining room late that morning, finding only van Hoorn, the company director, and the young American woman, Mrs. Parker, still eating breakfast at his table.
The young woman smiled amiably as van der Heyden took his seat. He nodded politely but otherwise ignored her, despite her prettiness, which had much held his attention the night before. Her drunken young husband had displeased the captain, so undisciplined had been his behavior. For all his own problems with alcohol, van der Heyden had never himself been that drunk, on duty or off. Drunkenness was a commonplace of trans-Atlantic crossings; but boorishness was not.
“Sorry to be so late,” he said, looking at his watch as a means of avoiding van Hoorn’s eyes. “There was an electrical problem last night. I wanted to talk to the duty officer about it.”
“So I understand,” van Hoorn said. “It was nothing serious, I presume.”
“Niets belangrijk,” the captain said, shaking his head. “A minor short circuit that set off an alarm. The third officer in charge over-reacted.”
“Your young protégé, Kees Witte. You told me you had great confidence in him.”
“Oh, I do. I do. He was just a little overly cautious. Better that than someone slipshod and casual.”
Mrs. Parker’s gray eyes were intent upon them. When they fell silent, she said, “Good morning, gentlemen,” and left the table briskly, before they could quite rise.
“Why did you sit this Parker couple at your table?” van Hoorn asked.
“Rich young Americans. Lively company. I thought they would go well with our British party.”
“Yet you kept the German count and countess away, along with the American motion picture actress.”
“We were not certain she would be dining in the salon. Count von Kresse had her brought to his table before we could do anything about it. Why all this happy welcome to these Germans?”
“They are very important Germans, van der Heyden. We are fortunate to have them with us. And it is unforgivable for the actress to be neglected this way.” He paused to dab at his mouth with his napkin. “We have a great opportunity here to make a good impression, Captain. We must not waste it.”
“As you wish, mijnheer.”
“I wish only what is helpful to the Lage Lander Line.”
“I will have the German count and his sister to my table. And of course the actress.”
“I will make it up to the young Mrs. Parker and her husband,” van Hoorn said. “Margrethe and I will sit at another table tonight and have them join us. I’ll make it a special invitation.”
Henry Crowder was in the second-class dining room, seated alone at a distant corner table, but happily there was no sign of Nancy Cunard. Spencer nodded to the colored man, for whom he felt very sorry, but went on to the other end of the room, near a window overlooking the sea. He had to admit that the preceding night was not without its pleasant moments, for all its strangeness, but he was in no mood to have Miss Cunard with breakfast. He had not eaten dinner and was now very hungry.
He ordered amply from the menu, stirring two teaspoons of sugar into the steaming cup of coffee brought by the steward. His first sip was dreadful. The coffee was horribly bitter. The steward, a Javanese who spoke poor English, had stepped away, but he hastened back.
“Something wrong, mijnheer?”
“Something very wrong,” said Spencer. “This coffee tastes like boiled sea water.”
“Sea water, mijnheer?” said the steward, a very young fellow with a fat, round face. He pointed to the view out the window.
“No,” said Spencer, pointing to his cup. “Sea water here. In the coffee. Worse than sea water. It tastes like piss. Bloody awful.”
“Bloody awful, mijnheer?” He peered down at the cup.
“Drink it.”
“Drink your coffee, mijnheer?”
Spencer sighed. Whitney would be delighted with such a scene.
“No. Don’t drink it. Just take it away.”
The steward smiled eagerly. “I take it away.”
He returned with Spencer’s meal—fried eggs, Canadian bacon, Dutch biscuits, French jam, Belgian potatoes. Spencer sprinkled them liberally with salt, and was not really surprised when his first mouthful of egg proved to be sickly sweet. He signaled the head-waiter.
“Oh, no, sir, oh, dear. You, too.”
“Me, too, what?”
The headwaiter picked up Spencer’s salt shaker, sprinkled a few grains into his hand and tasted them. “Yes, sir. You, too. Someone has exchanged the sugar for the salt at several tables. A very poor joke, sir. I am so sorry. It happened during the night. I am very sorry, sir. We shall not let it happen again. Are you all right, sir? Would you like more eggs? We are concerned about you. We shall not …”
“It’s all right,” said Spencer, waving the man away. “I’ll make do with this.”
Scraping the sugar from his egg, he reminded himself of what he had made do with in China. He must have eaten a dozen snakes.
“You will, sir? Are you sure? This is fine? You are not sick?”
“Fine, fine. Leave me be.”
“Yes, sir.” He backed away, then paused. “Sir. Please do not forget ten A.M. lifeboat drill.”
“Lifeboat drill.” On the tramp steamers Spencer had used for many of his travels, lifeboat drills were usually dispensed with, as in some cases were the requisite lifeboats.
“Yes, sir. Please, sir. Do not forget the lifeboat drill. Your lifeboat station number is on your cabin closet wall behind your life jacket. Everyone must take part in the lifeboat drill. We are concerned about you.”
The bells ringing through the ship came as a muffled tinkl
ing to Wallis in her bedchamber high above the lesser decks, but she was startled and alarmed nevertheless. Having breakfasted with the prince in her dressing gown, she had returned to her bedroom to change for the morning. He had gone back to sleep, complaining of his hangover, refusing to see anyone again until a curative could be produced. All his valet and Fruity Metcalfe could suggest was a stiff drink, and Wallis feared that would only lead to another and another, all of them dragged along again on one of his binges. He was getting out of her control, he really was. For all his ardor and hand holding and pathetic, impassioned notes, he was still quite capable of brusquely disregarding her. If people called him her little boy, as she had heard, he was too often a quarrelsome, disagreeable, and most disobedient little boy.
She hurried into the sitting room, opening the door to the outside deck. Inspector Runcie’s head appeared almost instantly.
“It’s lifeboat drill, mum,” he said. “Nothing to be worried about.”
“Shouldn’t we take part?” She had never missed lifeboat drill on her voyages. It was something of a superstition with her.
“I should think that would be difficult, mum.”
“Go find Major Metcalfe. Tell him I want to take part in the lifeboat drill. Some way must be arranged.”
“Yes, mum. I’ll be back double quick.”
Wallis closed the door, wishing circumstances permitted her to leave it open. Returning to her bedroom, she left that door ajar, and then hurried to the closet, pulling forth her life jacket and setting it on her bed.
She still had to dress, and quickly. Something sporty would be the most appropriate, a pair of white slacks and a light-blue blouse—shoes with low heels. She would wear little jewelry. Just the sapphire necklace and the gold and indigo bracelet.
Someone, something, struck the small of her back—hard—propelling her forward into the closet. Wallis tried to turn to face her attacker but stumbled and fell, clutching a dress that slid off its hanger and tumbled over her face. She heard the closet door closing and the sound of its lock turning. She screamed. After tearing the dress from her face, she found herself still in darkness, locked in darkness, imprisoned on a ship far out at sea with bells ringing in the passageways. She screamed again, fighting for breath, gathering oxygen to scream yet one more time. In the midst of it all, she heard the prince shouting, as if from a distance.
Spencer, secure in his bulky life jacket, stepped out on the deck. The card mounted above his cabin door said his lifeboat station was No. 11, a point aft. But the drill presented him with a wonderful opportunity. As safety precautions required, the door in the deck partition separating the first- and second-class promenades had been opened.
His invasion of the forbidden territory attracted no attention. The first-class promenade had few passengers on it. The group at the first lifeboat station he came to consisted of an officer, two crewmen, and just three passengers. But no Lindbergh. Sea law required that all passengers attend these drills. Everyone had to be accounted for—on a first-class ocean liner. He kept moving.
At the forward end of the promenade, just below the starboard bridge wing, was one of the ship’s two steel motorboats. A group of passengers quite larger than the others was gathered before it, in white clothes for the most part, heads held high and stiff by their life jackets as they listened to an officer speaking to them with his back to the rail. He was telling them of the wine, beer, tinned cheeses, and other provisions stored beneath the motorboat’s seats.
Spencer lingered, standing behind a tall blond Englishwoman who was chatting with a man in a mustache who looked to be her husband or lover, completely oblivious to what the ship’s officer was saying. Spencer glanced over the others, recognizing the actress Nora Gwynne in profile, struck again by her beauty and also by the seriousness with which she was listening.
There was another face beyond hers far more arresting, a line of nose and jaw and dark, glittery eyes eerily familiar, a face remembered from the painful long ago of early adolescence, someone he had seen nearly every day for three terms of school, someone amazingly unchanged. Henry Channon was indeed on this ship. There he stood.
There was little reason for him to have changed, to bear the weary facial lines and vaguely haunted look of so many of Spencer’s contemporaries. The man had sat out the war serving with the Red Cross in Paris.
He turned toward Spencer. He was a little fleshier now, but essentially still the same. The dark Moorish eyes were the same. “CHANNON, Mr. H., M.P.” the passenger list had said. Spencer had no idea what peculiar twists of fortune could make this strange and consumingly selfish American from Chicago a British member of Parliament. Since school days, Spencer had encountered the man once in Paris during the war—they were joined at dinner by Channon’s apparent friend, Marcel Proust—and again in London in the 1920s. Spencer supposed a parliamentary seat was not entirely unreasonable, given Channon’s intense Anglophilia—and consuming social ambition. In any event, there he was, Henry Channon, once the bait of school bullies, now traveling in very fast company indeed.
“Henry,” said Spencer. “Henry Channon. Is that you?”
The ship’s officer stopped talking. The others turned, Nora Gwynne staring at Spencer with a mixture of anger and disgust. Channon blinked, then signaled recognition with a nervous smile. He nodded, rather curtly, as if that would suffice as his contribution to the encounter. Spencer recalled that reminders of Chicago had embarrassed Channon in their earlier meetings. He had abruptly changed the subject whenever Spencer had brought up their school days on that strange evening with Proust.
But the situation could not be left at that so awkwardly. Spencer did not move on. Channon finally stepped around the others and came to Spencer’s side, his smile increasing a little as he limply shook Spencer’s hand.
“C. Jamieson Spencer. Of all people. What interesting luck running into you.”
“It’s been years, Henry. I’d wondered if you’d gone back to Chicago.”
Channon looked at him coldly. “Ha ha ha. Your wit is still as mordant as ever, old boy. I was back last year, very briefly, to see Mother. I’m married now, don’t you know?”
“To Mary Landon Baker? I’d heard you were engaged.”
The coldness in Channon’s eyes turned to angry flame.
“No,” he said, his teeth on edge. “To Lady Honor Guinness, daughter of the Earl of Iveagh. She’s just given me a son. He’s named Paul, after my friend King Paul of Yugoslavia.”
The others seemed to be uncomfortable witnesses to this dialogue. Channon was refusing to introduce Spencer to them, and they were compelled to observe this strange reunion silently and awkwardly.
“Well, then,” said Channon. “Here you are aboard our ship. I suppose we’ll see you at dinner. You weren’t about last night.”
“Sir,” the ship’s officer said to Spencer, irritated at the interuption. “Is this your lifeboat station?”
Spencer ignored him. “Actually, probably not,” he said to Channon. “My secretary made a mistake and booked me second class.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“Sir,” said the officer, “if this is not your lifeboat station, you must leave. You must go to your proper place. It’s required.”
“Right, then,” said Spencer, shaking Channon’s hand once more. “Some other time.”
“Indeed,” Channon said. “Some other time.” He emphasized the word “other.”
Spencer walked away with as much dignity as he could muster, which was not much. Nora Gwynne seemed truly appalled by him.
There had been an afternoon, in a basement corridor of Chicago’s so-very-prestigious Francis Parker School, when he’d found Channon on the floor with two other boys on top of him. For a fleeting instant he had wondered if it were a homosexual incident, but then he realized that one of the boys was choking Channon while the other held him. Spencer, the tallest in his class, had pulled both of them off Channon, smacking one in the side of the h
ead.
They’d fled, and Channon became his friend, though never explaining what he had done to make his attackers so angry.
Now he was the son-in-law of an earl, and Spencer was merely a second-class passenger on a one-way voyage back to Chicago.
When Spencer finally returned to his cabin, he found the carpeting of the passageway outside soaked with water and several crewmen tussling with a hose.
“Sorry, sir, but someone turned on a fire hose during the lifeboat drill,” one of them explained. “We have a joker on board.”
Fruity Metcalfe entered the prince’s suite with Inspector Runcie just behind him. Screams from Mrs. Simpson’s room and angry shouts from Edward’s halted them, Fruity uncertain where to go first. There was no man in all the kingdom more loyal to the Prince of Wales than Major Metcalfe, but the woman’s screams were more compelling. He threw open her door, looked frantically about. When she cried out again, he hurried to the closet. It was locked, and there was no key. After pulling on the doorknob to no avail, he crashed against the paneling. Noting the effect, he tried again, with more vigor. A third attempt rent the wood and the door easily came open. A hysterical Mrs. Simpson, large eyes made huge by fear, was on her knees. Recognizing Metcalfe, she ceased her screams and then began swearing.
Edward was sitting up in his bed, with Runcie hovering over him. The royal eyes were red with anger and last night’s drink.
“Fruity. Where the devil were you? Someone came into our suite.”
“Did you see who it was? Wallis was pushed into her closet.”
The prince sat up, shocked and gray-faced. “My God, no.”
“She’s all right. Did you see the person? What happened?”
“I saw only the door opening, and someone’s hand. I shouted, and then the door closed again quickly. Always looking out for my safety, you say. Subjecting us to constant annoyance and inconvenience and harassment. For our protection, you say. And so, Fruity, some phantom enters my bedchamber unmolested, hundreds of miles out to sea. Not well played, Major.”
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