Dance on a Sinking Ship

by Kilian, Michael;

  The door was unlocked and, before her thumping, gave way. “Nancy?” she called, and stepped inside. The bedclothes were in disarray and there was a dirty glass or two visible, but otherwise no sign of them—no clothing, no luggage, nothing. “Nancy?” she called again, poking into the closet, and then the bath. There were no toothbrushes, nothing at all.

  Someone was standing behind her—the room steward.

  “Something wrong, mum?”

  “My daughter. The people in this cabin. Where are they?”

  “Oh, they move, mum. This morning. Down to third class.”

  Emerald pushed past him, wanting to shriek. She would pursue Nancy no farther. She had done all a mother could do.

  Dagne returned from her morning’s vigorous walk, which had included much of the ship’s interior as well as some time on the outside deck. The count was up and dressed, again studying his aircraft drawings.

  She began brushing out her hair.

  “Mein Gott,” she said, “did you know this ship has a kosher kitchen?”

  “Don’t worry. I’m sure they won’t require you to eat from it.”

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

  “You must spend more time out in the world, Dagne. Civilization has many amenities nowadays unknown in Germany.”

  “Stop it.”

  “You stop it, bitte. Two envelopes came. One, I think, is a wireless message.”

  “Didn’t you open them?”

  “I have no interest in wireless messages, particularly if, as I presume, they come from Germany.”

  Only one of the envelopes contained a wireless message. The other was large, stiff, and formal, addressed to the both of them. Turning it over, Dagne stared at the royal crest on the back.

  “Liebchen bruder, Ich glaube wir grosse Glück haben.”

  “Ja, ja, Dagne. Sicher,” he said.

  She opened the envelope carefully. The words “His Royal Highness” jumped out at her, as did “commands me to invite you to a dinner.” The invitation was signed by a Major Metcalfe, whom she took to be an aide-de-camp.

  Dagne danced about the room, collapsing finally on the settee.

  “We’ve done it, liebchen!”

  “Congratulations. What have we done?”

  “We wanted to break into the royal circle. We’re being invited into it with open arms, by the prince himself! It’s like sailing unchallenged into the midst of the British fleet off Jutland.” She held the invitation up like a downed game bird. “Dinner! Tonight! In his suite! Auchgeseichtnet! Lady Cunard and Chips Channon must have told him about us. You see, my charm works its wonders.”

  “Good for you, Dagne, though I’m sure tonight’s will be as insufferable as last night’s dinner.”

  “This time you will have no choice but to mind your manners.”

  “Certainly. The prince can’t possibly be as loathsome and supercilious as those two.”

  “I am told he is an anti-Semite, liebchen.”

  “More of your wishful thinking. Liebchen.”

  Annoyed with him, she opened the wireless message and froze. The joy she had felt upon seeing the royal invitation now utterly vanished. It was from Goering, signed, as they had agreed, “Uncle.”

  “Sickness at home,” it began, which meant there was trouble and danger. “Sister Susan”—Goering’s code name for Himmler—“does not want you to return, but you must. Be careful. With love. Uncle.”

  She swore, to herself. Himmler had learned what they were doing and was trying to interfere. That was clear, just as it was that he did not want them to survive the voyage, that others might not want them to survive the voyage. But how would the Reichsführer-S.S. attend to that? With agents in New York? Where else?

  She went to the dressing room of their quarters and took her pistol from a suitcase, placing it in her handbag. She would keep it with her every moment now.

  They were always grasping and scheming, those others, those conniving exploiters who had seized upon the Führer’s brilliant rise to pull themselves out of the chicken shit that made up their small, mean, grubby lives—ever putting their ambitions over the one glorious goal of restoring Germany to its old power and grandeur. They had no idealism, these grubs. As her brother could never be made to understand, Dagne had idealism—enough for the both of them.

  “Is something wrong, Dagne?”

  “No, Martin. I’m just trying to think of what to wear tonight.”

  Spencer went to read in the first-class smoking room, which to his amazement had a working fireplace, though the smoldering logs kept rolling off the grate and a patient steward, like Sisyphus and his rock, had to rush over and restore them every few minutes.

  The room remained empty of other passengers for nearly an hour. It was not a place where Edwina could be expected to come—though he had come to realize that Edwina could be expected to go almost anywhere, if she put her mind to it. He had not come here in search of Edwina, or whatever it was she represented in this unreal other-life he now inhabited. It was simply a part of the ship he had not yet visited, and it therefore held out the promise of something new and different happening to him. Like a chance meeting with former army mail pilots from Minnesota.

  Nothing new and different did happen. Instead, Chips Channon walked in on him, wearing a tweed jacket and smoking, much the master of an English country house come to greet a guest. He took the chair opposite Spencer’s and ordered a whiskey before speaking. Spencer simply watched and waited.

  “I’ve been looking for you, dear boy,” Chips said, “having heard you’d changed your accommodations. I wanted to welcome you to our little circle, though I gather you’ve been welcomed quite warmly already.”

  “Henry—”

  “It’s ‘Chips’ now, Jamieson. To one and all.”

  “‘Chips,’ then.” Spencer smiled. “Why did you tell one and all about me and Alice Silverthorne? Hardly in the Francis Parker tradition. Old boy.”

  “It just came up. Alice is quite notorious down in British East, and everyone here knows about her. It was a way of explaining you. An introduction. You required some explaining, popping up like that. Perhaps you still require some explaining. Why are you here, Jamieson?”

  “I’m traveling on business back to the United States.”

  “No. I mean here. Among us.”

  “I was in second class. I was content with that. Lady Mountbatten wasn’t my idea, though she’s a lovely idea.”

  “Indeed. And what sort of ‘business’ are you on?”

  “Publishing business. Encountering you was completely a matter of chance. Or mischance, as you might put it, or I should. As a matter of fact, it’s something of a distraction.”

  “Though hardly the distraction presented by the inimitable Edwina.”

  “A very charming lady, as I said.”

  “And very generous,” Chips said, rolling his eyes to include the luxurious chamber as a silent addendum to his remark. “You’ve caught her in the depths of what’s come to be known as her black period, Jamieson. She’s flung herself all over the world in recent years, risking her life, struggling to be alone. She was nearly killed in a civil war in Bolivia and has brushed with death in every other godforsaken place. But she’s kept coming back. Turns up at all the best garden parties in the South of France, when she’s least expected. Lady Edwina, chipper again, brilliant again. Sometimes too chipper, perhaps. She paused overlong in America after her stay in the Pacific. Stayed with Joshua Cosden at his estate on Long Island, but saw quite too much of Harlem. According to gossip, she also saw quite too much of that skirt-chaser Prince Obolensky.”

  Spencer motioned to the steward. Channon was giving him reason to join in the ritual early drinking of these tribal British people, the same they doubtless gave each other.

  The logs had stopped rolling off the fire. The storm was easing.

  “Tuppenny royalty, really, the Mountbattens,” Channon said. “But the Prince of Wales quite dotes on
them.” He paused to study Spencer’s reaction, but there was none.

  “I like them, too,” he continued. “And she is quite beautiful.”

  “As you ‘English’ say, ‘quite.’”

  “Well, then,” Chips went on. “Since you’re going to be with us, let me tell you about the rest of our party.”

  “If you must.”

  “Dear boy, I should think you’d be rather intrigued. We’re the only ‘quality’ to be found aboard, I daresay. ‘We’ includes Emerald Cunard. Emerald, Lady Cunard. A dear friend of the Prince of Wales, and a very dear friend of mine.”

  “An aging salon queen who’s past menopause and dies her hair canary yellow,” said Spencer. “She carries on with an ex-wine salesman whom Adolf Hitler has sent to London as the perfect ambassadorial representative of the Third Reich. She’s a bitter, mean-spirited insomniac of a woman who can’t let an evening go by without insulting everyone at least once.”

  “You’re remarkably ill informed, Jamieson. Who said this to you? Edwina?”

  “Certainly not. Old boy. Much too decorous a lady. No, I chanced to chat with daughter, Nancy, who seems also to be aboard this social Noah’s Ark.”

  “It was a dreadful mistake of Emerald’s, to invite her. An odious, unwashed little communist, Nancy is. It’s my hope we’ll deposit her in New Jersey or on Ellis Island or some such place before docking.”

  Spencer took his whiskey from the steward’s tray. He wondered what Chips would have looked like in the kennels of Ellis Island when it was still used as a processing center for millions of immigrants. Since the war and the Red Scare of 1919, it had been converted into a deportation facility.

  “To get on with it,” Channon said. “We also have the Coopers. If you haven’t heard of Diana, you must be the most uncivilized man in the world. She’s the daughter of the Duchess of Rutland, don’t you know. One of the First Families of the Realm. And she’s probably the most beautiful woman in the Empire. I daresay half the men in Society are in love with her.”

  “The other half doubtless in love with her husband.”

  Chips lowered his eyelids. “You know little of British society, Jamieson. I’m certain of that. Duff Cooper much prefers women. He has a brilliant mind and a brilliant future, if only he’d come to his senses and abandon Winston for Neville Chamberlain and Sam Hoare. I like Winston awfully. And he’s a very close friend of the prince. But, like poor Duff, he’s much too pro-Jew and pro-French. He doesn’t understand quite which way the country’s going.”

  “As much as I admire what you say of Cooper’s politics,” Spencer said, “I think he’s a filthy lecher. Not above schoolboy panting and pawing at formal dinner parties. Innocent American girls as victims. Sweet young things you and I wouldn’t be worthy of.”

  “You disapprove of lechery? You, Jamieson?”

  “I disapprove of droit de seigneur.”

  “How middle class.”

  “He greatly embarrassed a passenger. Miss Nora Gwynne, who is by way of being a friend of mine now.”

  “Yes. Poor Edwina. She’ll be devastated to hear. At any rate, also with us are the Count and Countess von Bourke und Kresse. Brother and sister, you know, not man and wife, though I’m not certain it makes much difference to them. Very Prussian, yet very charming. You might enjoy him. He was an aviator, too, during the war.”

  “During the war I didn’t much enjoy Prussian aviators.”

  “Also, we have Peregrine, Lord Brownlow. An intimate of the Prince of Wales, and I daresay the likely candidate to be lord in waiting to Edward once he’s become king. Last we have Major Edward Dudley. We call him Fruity. A very dashing chap, rather like you were once, Jamieson. Cavalry officer. Became a friend of the prince’s in India. Married one of Mary Curzon’s daughters. You’ll recall that Lady Curzon—”

  “Was from Chicago. Just like us.”

  “More than that, Jimmy. That’s what I’m trying to impress upon you. There was never and never shall be anyone in Chicago like these people. No one so brilliant, no one so highly bred, no one so saignant. You must understand, Jamieson. These are the very best people on earth. The very best. They cannot be trifled with, be fooled with. Be embarrassed. Especially by one of my old friends.”

  “Have you really mentioned them all? I get the sense of frosting without the cake here.”

  “How clever of you,” said Chips. “Something to do with journalist’s intuition, no doubt. Very clever, and unwise.” He put out his cigarette and became very serious. He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees.

  Spencer abruptly stood up and crossed to the fireplace, hooking his arm over the mantlepiece. He swirled his whiskey in the crystal glass. He would play the lord of the manor for the moment, while Chips prattled on.

  Channon paused uncomfortably, looking up at his old schoolmate, who, though quite thoroughly rumpled, looked easily as aristocratic as he did, if not more so. Spencer had always had this presence. It was one of the things Channon had admired and envied him for. Spencer had ridden better than he, sailed better than he, danced better than he. But he had not succeeded in society. And Chips had reached society’s pinnacle. He would make Spencer wary of coming near, if he could.

  “Jamieson. Before this conversation goes any further, there’s something I must know. Your connection with the newspaper …”

  “I’ll come clean, Henry,” said Spencer, after taking a swig of warm scotch. “Nowadays, I’m just a crumbum reporter. I have been for years, as a matter of fact, ever since my father went bankrupt. Completely and utterly ruined, I am. I haven’t a cent. Haven’t had for the longest time.”

  “Mother wrote that she kept seeing your name in the paper. I hadn’t realized it might have been a by-line.”

  “I’m on this boat on a story.”

  Channon sighed, unhappily, as if Spencer had confessed to some great crime. Whatever Spencer did would adhere to him, as well.

  “Then you do know about the prince,” Chips said sadly. “Edwina told you everything.”

  “Hell, no. Old boy. It wasn’t just Edwina. It’s been practically everyone I’ve met. You might as well trot the royal fellow around the deck in a golden carriage. But you needn’t worry. My story has nothing to do with him.”

  “What? The Prince of Wales is the biggest story in the Western world. Do you know who else is with us? Wallis Warfield Simpson, the Baltimore lady who’s become the prince’s favorite. We have them both. Her husband, Ernest, a nice but dreary sort, actually, is off in Canada on business. This is raw meat for you newspaper types, Jamieson.”

  “Not me. I don’t give a damn.”

  “Well, what is this story you are on?”

  “Can’t say. It could ruin everything.”

  “It would help if I knew.”

  Spencer wondered what it would help. “I’m on the Wilhelmina to interview Charles Lindbergh.”

  “Lindbergh? Why, that’s ridiculous.”

  “Of course.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “To interview Charles Lindbergh.”

  Channon rose and went to stand next to his one-time friend as he might in the gentleman’s lounge of his club.

  “Enough bad jokes, Jamieson. This is quite important to us all. The consequences of, well, widespread public knowledge of the prince’s presence, and Mrs. Simpson’s, on this voyage could be disastrous for him, at least while the old king is alive. Your discretion is paramount. The others have sworn theirs. Will you? For the sake of friendship, and old times? For the sake of honor? You’ve always been an honorable man, Jamieson.”

  Spencer shook the other’s hand in affable, old-school manner. “Of course. Old boy.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes. Seriously. Of course.”

  Channon smiled benignly. “Well, then,” he said, taking an envelope from his pocket and handing it to Spencer. “I have a most pleasant surprise for you.”

  Spencer opened the envelope, wondering, for a passing
moment, if it might contain money. Instead it was an engraved invitation, with an elegant script filling the blanks. “I have been commanded by His Royal Highness …”

  “As you note, simply black tie. I’m not sure what your relationship is with Edwina at the moment, but it would be appreciated if you would be on your best behavior. Lord Mountbatten will be there, too.”

  “And how will he behave?”

  “Perhaps you’ll escort Miss Gwynne. You said you’re friends. It would be appropriate. Indeed, most suitable.”

  “Jolly well suitable.”

  “I daresay she could use a protector, after what you say about Duff, and I expect she could use some guidance, as well. Some social guidance. There’ll be cocktails in the Mountbattens’ suite beforehand. Seven o’clock. And, Jamieson. I promise you. Alice Silverthorne won’t be mentioned again.”

  The storm was spent. Though there were humplike swells slapping against the bow and sides, the winds had diminished as the following high-pressure center moved colder, clearer, and infinitely more stable air over them. The angry squall line was moving rapidly on to the east. The violent pitch and roll had ceased. All was well, except for one disappointment. The violent roll had stopped at the wrong moment. The Wilhelmina still heaved and shifted, but it was stuck in an irretrievable list to starboard. Every deck was slanted by twenty degrees. One could adjust one’s movements to the back and forth of the roll, but this slope made every step a clumsy one. Forgetfully, van der Heyden poured coffee straight into his cup, only to have the stream fall three inches to the side, splattering his shoe.

  He laughed. “Geblokkeerd.”

  “What’s wrong?” van Hoorn asked.

  The captain shrugged. “That we have to find out. There was a German ship that had this problem before the war. The Imperator. They had to refit her, taking weight out of the superstructure, removing the marble baths in first class.”

  “We already did that with the Wilhelmina,” van Hoorn said. “After the sea trials.”

  “It didn’t work with the Imperator either,” the captain said. “She still lists a little. She’s in the Cunard service now, you know. The British confiscated her after the war and renamed her the Berengaria.”