The truth of it weighed on his shoulders. He’d failed. Failed them all. All the souls in the decks below whose very lives depended on that door closing.
“It all happened so—so fast,” he mumbled.
“I doubt any of the lads got theirs closed either,” I said. Small comfort, really. But at least it was a burden shared.
“Come on,” Meg urged, shoving his coat at him and grabbing his free hand. She wasn’t giving up on him, even if he had. “We have to get out of here.” Turning, she pulled him back toward the crowded stairs and I followed behind. Hands clasped, they stumbled numb-legged down the hall toward the terrified mob surging and falling at the bottom of the stairwell, each desperate soul grasping at that last glimmer of hope.
I still see them all crammed in the tilted alleyway, their wet nightclothes sticking to their thighs, the sodden tails of her woollen coat dragging in their wake, people screaming and crying as they scrambled frantically for an exit that had tilted out of reach. The lights flared for a moment like a photographer’s flash, burning the image forever in my mind.
And then the darkness swallowed us.
Chapter Twenty-One
2:09 A.M.
“ELLIE!” MEG’S VOICE CRIED in front of me and I reached out in the pitch-black. The Empress groaned as if in pain and the tilted floor slipped out from under my feet as the ship rolled completely on her side. The force of it threw me against the bulkhead and a wave of water washed over me, filling my nose and mouth. I gasped for air and kicked, scrabbling hands and feet for something solid.
So this is how it ends.
I thought the deck had been totally submerged but my feet touched wood, and as I stood in the darkness, the water sloshed side to side and eventually settled waist high. It wasn’t over. Not yet.
I stretched out my hands to get my bearings, feeling carpet on my left where there should have been wall. Voices cried in blind terror as families desperately tried to reach one another, all of us completely disoriented.
She’s on her side, I told myself, and though I could see nothing, I tried to envision the alleyway I knew so well, turned it ninety degrees in my mind’s eye and realized that I now walked on what had been the right-hand wall.
“Meg!” I shouted into the shrieking mayhem. “Meg, where are you?”
“Here!” Her voice was not far from me. “Over here!”
I let it lead me through the frenzied hall. But as I walked along the wall, I stepped on a door that gave way beneath me. It opened suddenly, plunging me into the flooded room underneath. I dropped deep into the middle of the submerged cabin, banging my arms and legs against the flotsam of furniture. Terrified, I kicked hard, not sure which way was up. My hand flailed and grasped at something, a fabric—someone’s dress? But before I let go in horror, I recognized the feel. Not a dress—bunk curtains. I’d been heading in the wrong direction. Holding my panic with the last of my breath, I felt along the curtain to the rod and the wooden bunk rail. Hand over hand I finally touched the door frame and, lungs bursting, heaved myself through it.
“Ellie? Ellie!”
I retched and gasped. Trying to get my breath and bearings.
Careful to skirt the doorways, I found my way over to Meg. We clung to each other, crying both in terror that all was lost and relief at being found.
“We’re trapped!” I said, thinking of the stairs. “Oh God, Meg, there’s no way out! If we’d closed the portholes—”
“The portholes!” Timothy’s voice shouted beside me. I felt him leap and hang from the bulkhead above. Heard him kicking a few times before the wood splintered and fell upon us. Then he splashed down. “Climb up. I’ll give you a boost through the door.”
He linked his fingers and took my foot, heaving me upwards into the room. Thankfully, this one was dry, and I clung to whatever solid handholds and footholds I could find as I dragged myself inside. Meg and Timothy followed behind. In the cabin’s darkness, a glimmer of stars a million miles away shone through the open porthole and, though it seemed just as far, I moved inch by inch toward it. Toward a way out.
Finally, I reached the round window and, stepping on the bunk rail, pushed my arms and head through. I barely fit and the metal frame scraped my shoulders and chest as I desperately wriggled. Leaning on my forearms, I wrenched and kicked, hauling my body through, sure I’d shed my skin to do it.
I flopped onto the cold steel and lay there for a second, drained from the effort and dazed at the sight. The Empress lay on her right side, like a dying animal. She gasped through her gold funnels, now almost level with the water, hissing and sputtering as she drowned. Her right half was totally submerged and her left, all 550 feet of it, stretched like a black sandbar, sloping into the lapping waves.
Like a beach. A steel beach, I thought, my head trying to make sense of a shoreline of portholes. Hundreds of people clambered along the hull that stretched three football fields long. Some sat. Others staggered around in their tattered, sodden pyjamas, shivering from cold and shock. Many desperately clung to the white rail of the upper decks, as though that might save them.
Meg called to me and I got to my knees, guiding her through the narrow passage, like a midwife pulling her to her life. Once free, she collapsed beside me. “Timothy … help Timothy …”
He’d already pushed his head and right arm through the porthole, but there was no way his shoulders would ever fit. “Hold on,” he said, disappearing inside. He took off his coat and shoved it through the window. Meg grabbed it and slipped it on over hers, keeping both hands free to reach for him again.
Meg and I heaved on Timothy’s arm like a tug-of-war rope and just when I thought he might wrench through the narrow window, something snapped and, with a cry, Timothy fell back inside the cabin.
“Timothy!” Meg shrieked, and I grabbed her by the waist, holding her from diving in after him. I wouldn’t have the strength to get her out again.
A roar sounded from the ship’s two tall funnels as the river rushed down their hot throats and into her belly. I peered into the porthole where Timothy gazed up at us from the shadowy room. He stood straddling the door frame, cradling his right arm like a load of library books.
“Try again,” Meg begged, her voice frantic. “Please, Timothy. Please. It will work this time.”
I knew by his face it wouldn’t. We both knew.
“I’m not leaving you.” Meg dropped to her knees, leaning over the porthole.
“Don’t worry, Meggie,” he said, trying to be braver than he must have felt. “I’ll find another way out. Go ahead now to the lifeboats. I’ll meet you there.”
I didn’t want to tell them there were no lifeboats. That hardly any had been launched, and of those, the two or three I could see had pulled away, fleeing the dangers of a sinking ship. Fleeing the suck of its undertow and the desperation of the hundreds thrashing in the waters around us—passengers who’d made it up those alleyways and stairs only to be flung from the deck into the open water as the Empress rolled. Some still fought for survival, splashing frantically. Others bobbed in silence, their life vests white in the dark.
I looked back at Timothy. His face, pale in the dim cabin, framed by the round window that was wide enough to sink a ship, yet narrow enough to trap him inside. With a small step, Timothy dropped through the doorway and splashed back into the dark hall beneath. Meg screamed after him, but it was no use. He had gone.
A wild-eyed man ran by us, his feet thundering on the ship’s side. “She’s run aground!” he yelled. “We’re saved.”
But somehow, I doubted it. There were no shoals. Not here. There was nothing below us but black, freezing water. About a hundred and fifty miles of it. And though land was only six miles away on either side, it might as well have been six hundred.
A few lone swimmers staggered bloody and dazed, having dragged themselves onto our metal shore, where a woman stood, calling hysterically for someone who no longer answered. Water lapped at our feet as though the tide were
coming in, as though we were all of us lounging on a strand and not clinging to a sinking ship. It felt surreal.
“Come on, Meg.” I urged her away from the porthole, away from the water, for now. “We have to get to higher ground.”
Stepping over steel seams and rivets, we walked up the black hull and slumped, soaked and shivering, in the frigid night air. Our breath came in misty puffs as I put my arm around Meg and we huddled together. Already the tide had crept past our porthole. With every lap it drew nearer, swallowing more. I looked out past the water’s edge, past the floundering souls, past the distant few lifeboats to the lights of the Storstad flickering in the fading fog. I wondered how long she’d take to get back here.
And if we’d still be here when she did.
Chapter Twenty-Two
2:10 A.M.
WE’D ONLY SAT THERE FOR A MOMENT OR TWO. The Storstad seemed no closer, but I could tell that the Empress’s hull and our time on it were quickly disappearing as the water’s edge crept closer. A corpse floating face down drifted nearby, and I left our perch to wade over and take the vest the poor man clearly had no use for anymore. I tried not to look at his face, or the waves lapping up his legs, swallowing him one piece at a time. I could do nothing for him. I turned and, vest in hand, climbed the last few feet of slippery hull to where Meg waited. One vest between us. Still, it was better than what most had. We were young, uninjured. We had the hope of seeing our men again. It might be enough to buoy us up, to carry us on. Maybe.
I wrapped the belt around my right wrist twice and gripped it, making her do the same. “We’ll have to swim for it, Meg.”
She looked at me, horrified.
I pointed at the Storstad. “It’s not far,” I lied. “We can do it.” I hoped. “Just don’t let go. And kick your legs.”
But before we could move, the hull disappeared from under our feet. A mere fourteen minutes after she’d been hit, the Empress sank beneath the water’s surface and we along with her. A great cry arose like the roar at a football match as the seven hundred souls clinging to her side screamed in terror before going under. The freezing water gripped and shook us in the suck and drag of the ship’s wake, violently tossing us like rag dolls in a washer full of wood and metal debris. Deeper and deeper it drew us until I thought my lungs might burst. I’d no idea which way was up as my right arm yanked me forward. I’d given up all hope, when suddenly my head broke the surface and I gasped. Meg breached next to me, retching and coughing. Bodies bobbed up around us, and those still living floundered, grasping for anything and anyone within reach. Some used the dead to stay afloat. Others died fighting off the desperate grip of a drowning stranger. A moustached man flailed beside me. His hand closed in a death grip on my collar and dragged me under a few times. Letting go of the life vest, I dove down, finally shrugging him off with my coat. I gasped as I broke the surface again.
“Kick your legs,” I yelled through gulps of air as I grabbed the vest’s strap. We needed to break away from the desperate mob. But from the dark below, a hand grabbed my ankle, its partner clutching further up my calf. I thrashed and kicked, desperate to break free, but they only grasped tighter, climbed higher, dragging me to my death as they scratched and scrabbled for life.
I wouldn’t let them drag Meg down, too. Letting go of the belt again, I sank under the water. My lungs burned and my kicking slowed. And just as I was about to give in to the sinking darkness, the hands suddenly went limp and let go.
I broke the surface once more, exhausted, and reached for the vest, but my numb fingers couldn’t close around the string. Ice floes still drifted in these waters, even in May. It had to be below freezing. Meg shifted her weight off the vest, two flaps of six cork blocks in canvas the only thing keeping us afloat, even though it couldn’t carry us both at the same time. She pushed it toward me.
I wanted to protest, to insist that she stay on it. I was the stronger of the two, but I could barely even catch my breath. The Storstad seemed motionless in the distance, a mile or two away. I dropped my head. There was no way we’d make it. Voices still cried out in the dark, but there were fewer now. Perhaps they were saving what little energy they had left. Perhaps they had none.
Meg and I took turns resting on the jacket and kicking along beside it; if nothing else, it kept us moving. It made us feel like we were doing something. It separated us from the frosty corpses that drifted at the mercy of the current. ’Twas as though a whole village had drowned. I don’t know how long we struggled in the water. But as the cold numbed our limbs and despair numbed our hearts, I looked at Meg and knew she’d reached the point where she didn’t want to struggle anymore.
“Meg,” I gasped, reaching for her as her face dipped below the surface. “The lifeboats … just hold on.”
I pulled her to me and the life vest sank beneath us, both of us floundering for a breath, both of us choking in the dark. “Link your arm through the neck of it,” I said, coughing. “Float on your back.”
But she couldn’t. The two coats, hers and Timothy’s, weighed her down and neither of us had the strength to remove them.
She went under again.
“I can’t,” Meg said as her face resurfaced. “I’m so tired, Ellie.”
“Don’t give up,” I pleaded.
“I promised your aunt I’d take care of you”—her voice came in short breaths—“and that I’d never tell you the truth. But at least I can keep one of those promises. Take the vest.” She shoved away from me, from it, from all that might have saved her.
I lunged for her, clutched her collar in my failing fingers, grasping it again and again as she slipped from me. “Meg … don’t … I can’t hold you.”
“Barnardo’s,” she gurgled as she floundered.
Then her head went under for the last time.
Chapter Twenty-Three
2:30 A.M.
IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN MEG. She should have been the one prodded with a lifeboat oar and dragged from the water. It should have been her bundled in the sling and hoisted up the side of the Storstad. And as long as I live, I’ll never understand why it was me.
I shivered from shock as much as hypothermia as Mrs. Andersen wrapped a long shirt around me. I didn’t realize I was practically naked. Most of us were, as we huddled in the wet remains of whatever we’d had time to throw on. Mainly nightgowns and pyjama pants, flimsy items that had ripped asunder in our harrowing escape, in our fight to live. The first few survivors donned the extra clothes of the Storstad’s thirty-six-man crew. The small working vessel was not equipped for passengers, let alone the hundreds of survivors it hauled aboard. As more and more arrived, Captain Andersen and his wife wrapped them in whatever they could find: tablecloths, pillowcases, and curtains. One man had even resorted to wrapping himself in sheets of newspaper—we were that desperate for warmth.
Mrs. Andersen rubbed my numb arms through the flannel shirt and then closed my frozen fingers around a mug of whiskey, but I felt nothing. I didn’t want to feel anything ever again. “Drink.” She lifted my hands to my mouth.
The whiskey burned a path down my gullet.
“Ellie?”
I blinked as he came into focus. Not Jim—Dr. Grant. He was wearing only a pair of trousers, large ones he had tied up with a bit of rope. He gently touched my shoulder. “Are you hurt?”
My reddened limbs tingled and ached as they thawed. I’d been grazed, battered, and bruised. But I was alive. I shook my head.
“I could use your help—if you’re able,” he added.
“Are you the master of this ship?” Captain Kendall’s voice bellowed and he rushed at Captain Andersen. “You sank my ship—you were going full speed ahead in that dense fog!”
He raved like a madman and rightly so, as Dr. Grant intervened to hold Kendall back.
“I wasn’t going full speed,” Captain Andersen blurted, outraged by the ridiculous accusation. “You were!”
Two crewmen drew the men apart and Captain Kendall staggered, sup
ported by the doctor’s arms. His ship lay at the bottom of the St. Lawrence. Two-thirds of his passengers and crew were dead. His worst nightmare.
“Why didn’t they let me drown?” the captain cried. “Why didn’t they just let me drown?”
He voiced the pain so many of us felt. The question we’d never get answered.
The Storstad crew and a few sound passengers continued to help survivors on board. Almost five hundred of us in all. Most, like me, suffered from shock; many had broken limbs and bloody wounds; a few had gone completely mad and needed restraining as they called out names and tried to jump over the rail. Dr. Grant worked tirelessly with me at his side—splinting, bandaging, staunching, breathing life back into the seemingly dead. Nearly two dozen died after being saved, but there was nothing any doctor could do for them. And by the time the few Empress and Storstad lifeboats went out on their third trip in search of survivors among the debris, they found nothing but drifting corpses. Hundreds of them.
3:15 A.M.
THE EUREKA ARRIVED almost forty-five minutes after the Empress’s distress signal and the Lady Evelyn after that. They quartered the river in a vain search, and in the end, I heard they found five of our crew on an upturned lifeboat. And many more dead.
But we knew the death toll was much higher. For how many, like Timothy, had gone down with the ship, trapped in tilted alleyways and unable to escape? I hadn’t seen Gwen or Kate, Matron Jones or Gaade. Did they make it out? And what about all those passengers who drowned where they slept? Where they now slept forever.
And Jim? And Meg?
I couldn’t let my mind go there. I just couldn’t.
Shivering, I threw myself into the work at hand, thankful that Dr. Grant kept me focused on the living, on helping those I could.
At dawn, all the Empress passengers pulled from the St. Lawrence, both living and dead, were transferred aboard the other two steamers that would take us to Rimouski, the nearest town.
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