Unspeakable

by Caroline Pignat

  She’d squirmed as we drew nearer to the open window. “No, Ellie. No! That’s where the water will come in.”

  “You’re just overtired,” Mrs. Hanagan explained. “You’ve had a big day today.” In the end, she settled her young daughter in the lower bunk farthest from the window and, spent from all the excitement of her first day aboard, Gracie gave in.

  I closed the porthole slightly. Like most people in the outside cabins, her parents enjoyed having a bit of fresh air. Technically, the stewards were supposed to lock up every porthole that ran in long rows down the Empress’s steel sides. But when we appeared with our brass keys, many passengers protested, and, in the end, many portholes were left open. It wasn’t a big deal. It happened all the time. We’d report the open portholes to the night watchmen, who simply made note of it.

  The girls were in their bunks by the time I reached our cabin, Gwen nose deep in an article about the Irvings, Kate rolling her hair in the curls that would frizz before breakfast, Meg reading the latest magazine from Timothy. I changed into my long white nightdress and hopped into my bunk just below Gwen’s. The girls chattered a bit, and after the lights went out I heard each one’s breathing grow long and steady as she sank deeper in sleep. But I bobbed around in the same uneasiness I’d felt that afternoon, my mind tossing from one thing to another yet settling on nothing.

  Something just wasn’t right.

  12:45 A.M.

  I COULDN’T SLEEP. After what seemed like hours of restlessness, I couldn’t take it anymore. I needed air. I got up and slipped on my shoes and woollen coat and, with a quick glance at the three sleeping shadows behind me, slipped out into the darkness.

  The ship seemed deserted at this late hour. Though a few night stewards were on duty, even Gaade would have turned in. The Empress had stopped—probably to meet the mailboat from Rimouski. Men’s voices called to one another from down the side, and looking over the rail, I could just make out the dark outline of the dwarfed steamship Lady Evelyn slowing to a stop. A ray of light shone on the Lady Evelyn’s deck as a door opened in our hull and mailbags were thrown across from our ship to the other. Within minutes, mail delivered and hatch closed, we were underway. The lights of Lady Evelyn faded into the night as we parted.

  I gripped the rail, hoping the nip of the night air might settle me, or at least numb my mind as it did my fingers. But the cold only seeped into my bones, chilling me to the marrow with an unease that left me all the more anxious. After another fifteen or twenty minutes, the Empress stopped again. We must have been near Father Point. After navigating the two hundred miles of river from Quebec, this was where the river pilot’s trip ended and he disembarked onto the cutter that had met us alongside. From here, Captain Kendall took over and we gathered steam. Next stop, Liverpool.

  I flipped up my collar and took a deep breath, the cold air pinching my nostrils and piercing my lungs. Poor John. I glanced up at his post high in the darkness where he manned the crow’s nest on the foremast. It was from there he had spotted the night steward approaching Jim and me during our first-class dinner, and from where he’d seen the ice floes on our way in to Quebec a few days ago. I hoped he’d have as keen an eye at night on our way out—for there was surely ice in the air. And for all we knew, in the water too.

  As my gaze fell from the mast, I noticed him farther down the rail. Jim stood, motionless, in the misty rays of light that fell from the windows, hunched over his journal. Writing. So intent upon it, in fact, that he never noticed me standing there. I wondered what had riveted him so.

  Or who.

  I watched him for a while, the tilt of his head, pencil at his lips, the eagerness of his scribbling when the thoughts flowed. For a man of few words, he certainly had a lot to write.

  A low bank of fog crept in over the water, blurring the lights of another ship in the distance. I’d often wondered how the captains navigated in conditions like these, with neither sight nor star to guide. Jim had told me once as we passed ships before, something about the lights—I squinted in the darkness. Green, I thought. We’d pass green to green on the right side. But then as suddenly as it had appeared, the vessel vanished in the fog.

  The Empress gave three short blasts. The signal that we were reversing engines and slowing down. Captain Kendall wasn’t taking any chances, thankfully. The horn of the other ship echoed eerily in the darkness and I shivered as the fog draped my shoulders like a damp shawl, making me sneeze.

  Jim looked in my direction, and as our eyes met, I felt everything at once. Embarrassed at being caught spying, anger for how he’d left me in Quebec, confusion about why, exactly, and, under it all … desire. A yearning, a great longing for him to look at me the way he did at the top of the hill. I felt torn, like I wanted both to be seen and at the same time to disappear completely in the fog, and so I stood frozen on the spot, unsure of whether to run to, or from, him.

  The Empress’s horn gave two short blasts. We were at a dead stop. Lost in the fog.

  Jim closed his journal and slipped it in his pocket as he stepped toward me. “Ellie?”

  Don’t let him in, a voice said. Don’t let him hurt you again. I clenched my jaw. He’d never even apologized or explained his actions in Quebec. I didn’t want any more games. He’d said it wasn’t right—we weren’t right.

  But as he moved closer, I knew the truth. Every part of my being did, and my resolve crumbled.

  Jim stood before me and lifted his hands, cupping them gently around my face. Like a sheltered flame, I felt suddenly stronger, warmer, brighter. His thumbs brushed my cheeks one at a time, clearing the two tears I hadn’t realized I’d shed.

  “Oh, Ellie,” he whispered, his eyes locked on mine, reading me with the same intensity that he had his journal. “I am so sorry.” He lowered his face to mine, put his mouth on mine, and I melted into him. My hands slipped inside his open jacket, up his chest, and spanned the width of his broad back as he pulled me to him, the heat of him drawing me as surely as his strong arms.

  I didn’t know what he was sorry for—for hurting me, for leaving me, for what sadness he saw in my eyes, or perhaps for what sad news he had yet to tell. I didn’t want to know.

  I just wanted him. Here. Now.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “THE BAND, THE LAUNCH, THE CAT.” Steele sat across from me in the wing chair by the fireplace, ticking off the details like a shopping list as he scanned his notes. “The dinner, and settling Gracie in her room.”

  I hadn’t told him all I remembered. Some memories were mine to treasure. And many were mine to forget.

  As if I could.

  “Were you sleeping when the Empress was hit?” he asked, urging me to see what I’d shied away from these long weeks. I had never talked about it to anyone.

  We’d come to it, then. The accident. That night.

  “No.” I took a deep breath and gripped the armrests, trying to hold myself here in the present even as the memories of that night pulled me back. “I was at the rail. With Jim. Starboard side on the Lower Promenade Deck.”

  His mouth dropped as he raised his eyebrows. “So you felt the Storstad hit?”

  “Worse,” I said. “I saw it.”

  1:55 A.M.

  I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG our kiss lasted, minutes I suppose, but your whole life can change in an instant. Mine did. One second Jim and I were lost in each other, and the next we were caught in the white glare of the Storstad’s masthead lights. It burst from the fog and barrelled toward us. There was no time for it to turn or reverse its engines. All it could do was shriek its horn as it rammed the Empress midship. I braced myself for the impact, sure it might throw us from where we stood farther up along the rail, but there was no bone-jarring collision, no screeching or horrendous crash, just the spark of metal on metal as it knifed her deep between her ribs.

  “Christ Almighty!” Jim shouted and ran down the deck.

  I caught up to where he stood near the middle of the ship and, gripping the rail, looke
d over it, horrified to see what should not be there. Another ship—jutting out of her side.

  “It’s in at least fourteen feet,” Jim said, panicking as he leaned over for a better look. “She’s breached from Shelter Deck to well beneath the waterline. Maybe even down to her boilers.”

  I held my breath. That had to be four or five decks down.

  “Keep your engines ahead,” someone yelled from our wheelhouse on the deck above us. ’Twas basic first aid, really. The impaling ship itself might cork our hull, might staunch the wound it had just caused if its engines propelled it to keep the pressure. But even as the man’s voice called, the Storstad twisted astern and with a groan of metal pulled free, disappearing back into the fog.

  My pulse rushed in my ears, a gushing shwoosh making my head spin.

  This can’t be happening!

  My vision tunnelled and the ground seemed to tilt beneath me, making me swoon.

  Jim’s hands were on my arms, shaking me as he yelled. The strength of his grip hurt but it dragged me back to reality. “—do you hear me, Ellie?”

  I focused on his face, saw the urgency in his eyes. The panic. His fear sobered me, and I realized it wasn’t my lifeblood I heard, but the gush of the St. Lawrence, gallons of it, surging through the hole, the hole in our ship.

  He yelled it again. “You have to get to a lifeboat.”

  “What?” A lifeboat? Surely it wasn’t that bad.

  “Listen to me!” He shook me again. “She’s listing, Ellie. Even as we speak. Do you not feel her?”

  I looked down at my feet, steady on the teak deck, and realized it wasn’t the shock that left me unbalanced. Jim was right. The Empress had rolled slightly toward her injured right side. As she listed, more of the gash in her side slipped under the waterline, and more water thundered in.

  “But—” How could this be happening? The hole was probably a dozen feet wide and who knew how deep, but there was no way it breached even three of the eleven compartments. Once the crew closed the watertight doors, we’d be fine. Wouldn’t we? She’d been designed with that precaution. I looked back at Jim. “But you said she’d float even with two compartments flooded.”

  “It’s like the Titanic,” he said, his greatest fears realized.

  “This is not the same, Jim,” I said reassuringly. He had to be overreacting. “The iceberg punctured her many times, but there’s only the one hole in the Empress.”

  He turned and pointed the length of the ship, down the hundreds of portholes row upon row. A few shone like torchlights on the water but most were in darkness as over a thousand passengers slept within. True, portholes are watertight, even when submerged. If they are closed. I realized with horror—most were not. The night had been calm. We weren’t even out on the open seas yet. Even I had left most portholes open for my passengers to get a bit of air.

  The ship tilted a fraction lower and the dark water lapped the lowest row of portholes, drawing her down a little further as it burst through.

  “Dear God, Jim.” I turned back to him, mirroring the terror in his face as the horrible truth rushed in. “Her hull—it’s riddled with holes!”

  The emergency horn gave a single blast, making us both jump. All hands to the boats. This was no drill. Jim looked over his shoulder as crew members, some half-dressed, burst from the doors and ran to their stations. Within seconds, two men had climbed in the lifeboat while the team swung the davits, the huge pair of cranes that suspended the lifeboat over the Boat Deck. Another four men gritted their teeth as they pushed the boat clear of the rail, where it hung over the dark water seventy feet below.

  They’d done this drill hundreds of times, but never on a tilting ship, and even the slightest list had an enormous effect on the two-and-a-half-ton steel lifeboats. Though it looked as if the men might get three or four free, most of the other lifeboats sat jammed against their davits, and no matter how the men had practised or how they scrambled and bellowed now, the fact of it was, those boats were stuck.

  Jim looked over his shoulder and then back at me, torn. “Promise me, Ellie, promise me you’ll get to a boat.”

  “Come with me!” I gripped his dark coat, not wanting to let him go. A great trembling ran through me and wouldn’t stop.

  He took my hands and held them tight. He’d somehow calmed himself, even as the ship rolled another few degrees. As though he’d resigned himself to her fate.

  Or his.

  “Go now,” he pleaded. “Warn your passengers. And then get yourself to a boat. It’s your only hope.”

  “But—but what about you?”

  He drew me in his arms and I felt safe. Stronger. “You are my hope … and I won’t lose you, Ellie. I won’t.” His mouth trembled as he said it, but his resolve was firm. Contagious. Even I believed him. He kissed me, hard. Then suddenly he was gone. Running for the stairs to the engine room, running toward the flooding hold of a sinking ship.

  And I never saw him again.

  Chapter Twenty

  2:00 A.M.

  I WANTED TO RUN AFTER JIM. My heart screamed to follow him, but my head overruled, mindful of the passengers, the families still abed, who had no idea of the danger they were in. Suddenly all those drills kicked in and I knew what I had to do.

  I fled down the deck to the back stairs and down the alleyway, passing pyjama’d crew mustering to their tasks. A few passengers milled about the hallways; others poked their sleepy heads out their doors as Gaade’s voice belted through the halls, “Please put on your life vest and proceed to the Boat Deck.”

  “What did he say?” they murmured.

  “Have we hit an iceberg?” someone asked.

  “Where are life vests?”

  “Boat Deck, good heavens … which way is that?”

  Their voices grew in panic. At two in the morning, on the first night of the voyage aboard a ship they didn’t yet know, it was no surprise the passengers were so disoriented. A few frantic women clung to Gaade’s arms, begging to be helped.

  “No one will be saved,” he said, pulling himself free, “unless you give us a chance to get on deck and get the boats out.” His abruptness said it all. Things were bad, very bad.

  “Hurry.” I reached the first of my passengers’ cabins and pulled the life vests from the cupboards. “Put these on and get up on deck.”

  They stared at me, bewildered, as though I’d been into the barman’s booze. But they felt the list. They’d only to stand up out of bed to realize something had gone terribly wrong. The floor was slanted enough to send furniture sliding, spilling cups and perfume bottles from the shelves. They staggered about in the small rooms, trying to find their balance as they pulled on coats and shoes and dithered with the long strings of their white cork vests.

  “Just go!” I shoved them out the door. A buttoned coat and knotted vest would do them no good if they never made it on deck. The ship listed further to the right, and by the time I’d reached the Hanagans’ room, water exploded through the portholes like a full-on firehose, its foot-wide stream blasting through the small cabins and into the hallways. Passengers screamed as they burst from their cabins, sodden from where they’d been doused in their beds, woken from their dreams to this nightmare. The frigid water gushed up my calves; already my feet were numb. If the water had reached these portholes, what about those hundreds of poor souls in the many decks below—in third class? In the engine room?

  The Hanagan family joined the throng of panicked people filling the tilting alleyway, desperately pulling themselves along by the handrail, pushing and shoving their way to the staircase that went up to a landing before fanning left and right. Or at this point, up to open air or down into the water. The pitch of the ship had sloped the stairs so much that the passengers had to crawl up them on their hands and knees, and even with several young Salvationist men lifting and pulling people up the incline, I realized that most people would not make it in time.

  “Ellie, where’s Meg?” Kate called to me from the crowd, her
face as white as her nightdress, hair still in rags. She held a screaming toddler in one arm and his hysterical mother in the other.

  I glanced around the panicked mob. She would have done her duty to her passengers, and then … I knew. I knew exactly where she’d gone.

  I shoved through the surging crowd, trudging in the water rushing against my knees. Finally saw them both working on the watertight door, Timothy pushing on one side of the T-crank as Meg pulled on the other. They’d managed to jam the crank in the hole in the floor beneath them, but even with both of them trying, it was not moving. Neither was the watertight door in the deck below.

  “Leave it!” I yelled, pulling Meg back. Like me, she’d thrown her coat over her nightdress. Timothy’s hung from the bulkhead. And we hadn’t a life vest between the three of us. In her nightie with her hair matted about her shoulders and stuck to her sweating forehead, she looked like a child after having a nightmare. I suppose we all did, really. It was a nightmare—and, truth be told, we were too young for this. Too young to be responsible for the lives of so many.

  “But we have to close it!” Timothy said through gritted teeth as he took both sides of the T and cranked again, veins bulging blue on his red forehead. He’d prided himself on the fact that he’d been assigned Door 86—one crucial to the safety of the ship—bragged that he could close it in under three minutes in every drill. And he had. But that was under perfect conditions. And these were anything but perfect.

  The lights flickered and the ship rolled a little more. She was easily at a fifty-degree angle and falling faster. Freezing water rushed around our thighs, rising quickly. Time was running out.

  “It’s too late, Timothy,” I said, gripping his trembling arm. Jim had told me all about the watertight doors in one of his life-saving-equipment rants. “The door closes toward the centre of the ship. At this angle, that’s practically upwards. It’s solid steel, you’ll not move it.”