Katharine stood by the bed staring down at a small form that was stilled forever. The child’s half-open eyes glittered faintly in the dim light from the oil lamp in the comer of the long room. Another child whimpered in a bed nearby, and a man tied into his bed raved in a low hoarse voice. It didn’t seem to matter what they did, the children died one by one.
“What can you expect?” Thomas said bitterly. “Brought up on rotten potatoes, they’ve no resistance. If they had come from first class, we’d have saved at least half of them.”
Her eyes filled with tears, and she walked automatically into the dispensary office and sank down on a chair with her face in her hands. The voyage that should have been one of triumph had been instead an evil dream that had no waking. The storm had continued, inexorably pushing them back, making the ship struggle for each nautical mile. Morale aboard was hopeless, most of the seamen refusing any but the easiest of duties, drunkenness rife, the officers surly. The captain had taken to staying in his cabin most of the time except for brief forays to the bridge to check their course. Only the stewards had remained faithful; without them, Katharine wondered what would have become of them all. She herself for the last five days had lived entirely in the dispensary amid the stink and mess and hopelessness of the pestilence that killed so capriciously. She found herself aching for Christian and Thomas both, each in his own way suffering terribly. She was too tired to resist any further, and she wept against her open hands.
“What’s the matter, Katie? What happened?” It was Thomas, who had entered the office. He put a hand on her shoulder.
She shook her head helplessly, unable to stop crying. He gently drew her to her feet and took her in his arms. “There, there, love. It will be over soon.”
Suddenly she realized that she could smell spirits on him. Dear God, were they not even to be spared this, that Thomas would let them all down, himself included?
“It was the oldest O’Donnell boy this time,” she said shakily. “That’s the last of them. How am I going to tell Molly O’Donnell? She’s been so good about helping to nurse them all, and then to have every one of the children go …”
He kissed her cheek as he held her. “Think of it this way, they didn’t have much to look forward to, poor little tykes. Fourteen hours a day in a mill or a garment factory. You’ve seen what it’s like.”
“I’m sorry to put this on you, Thomas, I really am. I’ll be all right in a minute.”
His arms tightened then, and he buried his face in her neck. “Oh God, Katie, I love you so.” His voice was strangled.
She stiffened in surprise. “Thomas! You never —”
“No, I never did, and I wish I hadn’t now.” He had moved away from her, his back to the light. She could see only dimly the look of hopelessness on his shadowed face.
“Dear Thomas, you know how fond of you I am —”
“Hush, love.” He put a gentle hand on her mouth. “I could have made you forget all about that bastard Ship-man, even about Christian, but I’m only half a man, you see.” His even tone of voice was uninflected, and though the smell of liquor was strong, he seemed to be in possession of himself.
“What do you mean, only half a man? You’re as much a man as any I can think of.”
“Except that I cannot perform the act of love, I cannot pleasure a woman. I can’t, as the vulgar say, get it up.” His voice had gone bitter now.
“Surely there’s something that can be done —”
“Don’t you think I’ve tried everything? I once married, you know, and at last I set her free, but not before we had all but destroyed each other.” He smiled sadly. “She was something like you — warm, loving, spirited. Even she couldn’t help me, though, and I would never again go through — or allow anyone else to go through — the agony we suffered.”
No wonder he drank. She looked up into his shadowed face and felt a wave of tenderness and affection and pity wash over her. “Thomas,” she said softly, “perhaps if we —”
“No! This feeling I have for you will pass, but I won’t go through the other again. Ever. Believe me, I would kill myself rather than suffer all that even one more time. You can have no idea of the humiliation.”
“I’m so sorry, my dear — so very sorry. That sounds stupid, doesn’t it, but there is nothing else I can say, and I wish there were.”
He ran his hand down her cheek. “I’m the one to say I’m sorry. I should never have told you how I felt toward you. It was just that seeing all these children die —” He stopped, shrugged. “Take care of Christian, Katie. He’s a good man.”
Christian. Why did he go on so about Christian, who hadn’t the slightest interest? “Does Christian know? About you, I mean?”
He nodded. “It was he who got me to stop feeling so sorry for myself that I had to dissolve it all in alcohol.”
“He doesn’t care about me, you know. He has, as they say, other fish to fry.”
“You’re wrong. I’ve seen him watching you. When he comes to the dispensary, he never takes his eyes off you.”
She was too tired to pursue it, too tired to feel anything for anyone anymore. The helpless pity and anguish she had felt for the dying children and then for Thomas had cauterized her. Charles was a distant, not very interesting dream, and even the vision Thomas had given her of Christian only made her think of perhaps holding him quietly and being held as Thomas had held her, comforting, undemanding, the way children frightened or in trouble hold each other.
The ship plowed on toward Halifax, now their destination because of the shortening supply of coal.
Chapter V
Katharine was shocked awake by being jammed painfully against the line that they all used to tie themselves in bed. They had finally cleared the storm a day back, but the seas had continued high and vicious. This lurch had been more abrupt and violent than that of a wave, however. There were wails and cries from the remaining six typhus patients, the eleven cases of broken bones, and the woman in labor, all of whom had had to be bedded down in the same room. In the first-class dispensary rooms they had two broken legs and a heart case, though she couldn’t hear them over the noise around her. She realized suddenly that like a kind of bass accompaniment to the panicked human voices there was a clanging, grinding noise that reverberated through the ship. Another savage jolt threw her against the rope again.
With some difficulty she got the knot untied and stood up to find that the floor was tilted. Had she not instinctively grabbed the head of the bed bolted to the floor, she would have been sent flying across the room by the next jarring blow. The chimneys of all of the oil lamps had been thrown and smashed on the floor, but the bases were securely fastened in, and though they guttered, smoked, and stank, the flames continued to burn.
“Are you there, Katie?” It was Thomas shouting to her from the door of the office. “We’ve got to get them out — the ship’s run aground. She’ll pound herself to pieces in this sea!”
Katharine extricated Molly O’Donnell, who had been unable to free herself, and the three of them each carried a child up the tilted stairs onto the open deck, where they found an unbelievable scene of panic and disaster. The ship had ridden bow first up a shelf of rock hidden by the water and then tipped to the side, piercing itself on two sharp spines upon which the vessel hung impaled, each thrust from the giant combers now breaking over her tearing at the already mortal wounds. Even in the middle of April the spray was icy and the wind cutting. Shrieking clumps of passengers in their nightclothes huddled about the deck. Of the three whaleboats fastened on the deck, one had been smashed to matchsticks in the storm, but the other two were surrounded by a crowd of men hauling them toward the railing, which was being flattened by seamen with sledgehammers.
“For God’s sake take those children back where you got them! They’ll only freeze up here!” It was Christian in dungarees and a borrowed seaman’s peajacket. “We’re going to try to get at least one of the boats to shore with a line.”
&nbs
p; A rocket shot up then from somewhere on deck, trailing sparks as it climbed into a clear, starlit sky, until it burst in a bloom of white radiance that lit up the deck, a terrifying array of jagged black rocks on either side, and a hundred yards or so before them a forbidding coast composed of a narrow beach overlooked by hundred-foot rocky cliffs. In places there was no beach at all, and the angry surf hit exposed rock, shooting halfway up the cliffs in a welter of foam and spray.
“You surely don’t think it possible to land people there,” Thomas protested. “They’d be better off on the ship. We’re on the Canadian coast — someone’s sure to come to the rescue.”
“I don’t intend to land them on the beach. I’m going to take one of the boats in with a line, climb the cliffs, and, with any luck we can have half a dozen bosun’s chairs taking them off within an hour.”
Katharine looked at the hostile seascape before her and felt her heart turn to ice. No one could go into that maelstrom and live.
“Why not wait for help?” Thomas persisted.
“Because the ship is either going to break up or blow up, very possibly before any help can reach us,” Christian replied impatiently.
“Blow up!” Thomas exclaimed incredulously.
Christian shrugged. “We’re already losing ground with the pumps, and every time we’re shoved against those rocks by a wave, it gets worse. We’ve shut down the fires in the boilers, but they’ll stay hot enough for hours to explode when enough cold seawater hits them.”
“Hadn’t you better get everyone up on deck then, where they’ll have a chance?”
“We’ve barricaded the steerage already,” Christian said in a dead voice. “If all of those people come up on deck and inevitably run to this railing, we’ll punch those rocks clear through us and we’ll all end up in the water right now.”
“There are women and children down there!”
“Once we get the lines rigged, we can begin letting passengers up on deck, but in quantities that won’t destroy all of us.”
“The first-class passengers first, no doubt,” Thomas said bitterly.
“The women and children, yes,” Christian admitted. “Then the women and children from steerage. Lastly the men.” He looked at Katharine for the first time. “I want you among the first to go, Kate.”
She opened her mouth to protest, but thought better of it. If she wasn’t there to go, then she could hardly leave, could she? She smiled at him and started to carry the frightened child in her arms back down the stairs. She and Molly and Thomas tried to calm the by now all but hysterical patients in the dispensary, surrounded by the terrible clanging grinding din of the waves smashing on the ship and the inexorable grating of the rocks plunged ever deeper into the ship’s heart.
When she could get away to go up on deck again, she saw that though both boats had disappeared from the deck, there was only one in sight on the water. Had the other already landed? Then she saw the other one, holed and wallowing almost to the gunwales in water alongside the grounded ship. Even as she watched the one they had managed to launch successfully, a huge wave caught it stem on and buried it in a mass of churning white water. There was a heartbroken moan from the watchers on the ship. It wasn’t until minutes later that in the starlight they could make out the shape of the overturned boat running up on the beach and at last sticking in the sand, its stern still floating free for a moment in the outgoing wash of the wave before settling heavily on the wet sand. Of the men aboard they could see nothing.
She grasped the arm of a seaman standing nearby. “Where is Mr. Hand?”
He looked at her dully, then jerked his thumb toward the dark shape of the distant overturned boat, now swung sideways in the periodic wash of seawater on the beach. “Out there.”
She closed her eyes against the flash of agony that shot through her. In the growing light she could see figures now on top of the cliffs and realized that they had been brought by the rockets and were watching the mortally wounded Circe destroy herself on the rocks. Some of them must be fisherfolk, she thought numbly. They will have boats and will come to take us all off. He died for nothing. Thomas was right after all, wasn’t he? I did care for him. Oh God yes, I cared for him, and now it’s too late …
She felt two hands grasp her shoulders. “That was Christian out in that, wasn’t it?” Thomas demanded.
She nodded, wordless, the knowledge of his sympathy and grief at last bringing stinging tears to her eyes, blurring the dreadful scene before her: the silent watching figures, the overturned boat, the great combers shouldering their way in to shore where they boomed up onto the sand, causing a constant tumultuous roar punctuated by the metallic explosions of the waves breaking out here against the ship itself.
“Why do they all just stand there?” she asked despairingly at last. “Why don’t they come to take us off?”
“I doubt they could launch any boats from there in this kind of surf. They’re probably bringing them from some sheltered harbor, possibly several miles or so away. I’ve been told that Halifax itself is only twenty miles from here.”
A stinging icy spray from waves breaking against the canted stern drove the first-class passengers from the chill of the open deck. All about them lay a welter of rough white water pierced here and there with jagged black fangs of rock, as if they had fetched up in the jaws of some great prehistoric marine monster that sought to crush the ship out of existence.
Down inside the Circe where the engine room, the dispensary, and the steerage were located, there was a terrifying constant grinding and clanging and booming that made it impossible even to communicate except at a shout directly in the ear of the listener. Thomas and Katharine and Molly could only smile with more reassurance than they felt and lay comforting hands on their terrified patients.
“It won’t be long now,” Thomas announced as he came down from his turn on deck. “There’s a fleet of dories and whaleboats bearing down on us, and someone must have rescued the line from Christian’s whaleboat, because they’ve pulled the heavier cable over and have it secured to the top of the cliff. They claim they’ll have six of them going before long and that they’ll take our people across first, all except for the fever cases. Those will have to wait until after the steerage all go —”
“But that’s not fair!” Katharine broke in. “Two of the typhus patients are children!”
“Fair or not, I wasn’t going to argue or they’d put all of them last. We’ll slip those left into one of the boats.”
When Katharine went up on deck, however, she could see that the boats were standing off from the crippled ship, riding up and down like a flock of seabirds but not coming any nearer. The second rescue line had been secured, and the first-class passengers were again milling about anxiously on the ever more slanted deck. They were dressed now and clutching all manner of valuables that they meant to take with them, some hung about with sacks and bags for all the world like peddlers hawking their wares. From below even over the crashing of the waves against the ship there could be heard the thin wailing of the steerage passengers, understandably panicked at being shut away when the ship could break up at any time.
Katharine hastened back down, and they began to bring the dispensary patients up on deck. Some they took by stretcher and some they supported between two of them. They laid them on blankets on the deck toward the bow, protected by the grand saloon from the waves crashing over the stern. As she passed by, Katharine looked into one of the large saloon portholes. The chairs and sofas were all in position, since they were bolted down, but all the elaborate maroon silk fringe hung out from the furniture and walls at a comical angle. She remembered the considerable trouble she had been to trying to match the color properly in London and winced as she thought of all that velvet and silk elegance rotting away among the sea growths at the bottom of the ocean. Poor Christian, he had been so proud of his handsome ship, and now he was gone and the Circe dying. Katharine bit her lip and hurried on toward the dispensary companionway.
Within the hour the dispensary patients on deck had all gone whisking off in the canvas seats with their ring buoys attached to pulleys that went sailing up the lines, pulled by those on the cliff. The deck had now taken on almost a holiday air as those waiting to be rescued saw that it would be only a matter of time before they too would be standing safely on the cliffs waving gaily to their fellow passengers still on board. There was much chafing and laughter and a kind of smug excitement about having been in danger and now out of it.
When the last woman and child from the first class had been seated in the breeches buoy, the men stepped forward in their turn, fully expecting that having chivalrously allowed their women to precede them, it was now their turn to be taken off. Captain Knight, who since the wreck had for the first time conducted himself as the leader of the ship’s company, tried to explain.
“You’ll be taken in due time, gentlemen, but I must remind you that there are still women and children aboard.”
The men stood confused for a moment, their fur coats and high hats gleaming in the thin morning sunlight, puzzled by what he meant. “Do you mean to tell us, sir, that the rabble below will be allowed to go before we do?” protested a monocled man with marcelled graying hair, the first to react to what the captain was saying.
“Only the women and children,” the captain hastily reassured him. “If we don’t,” he added practically, “there is every chance that they will break out en masse no matter how we try to continue confining them, in which case we shall all perish.”
Kings of the Sea Page 33