Kings of the Sea

by Van Every Frost, Joan

  “Damn your soul, I’ll not sit still for this! They and their brats can bloody well wait!” someone else shouted, and before the crew knew what was happening, several pistols had been drawn.

  “Oh no,” Katharine breathed from her vantage point up near the bow where she was tending the typhus patients.

  The captain, looking more exasperated than afraid, turned his back on the men and signaled to a seaman to go below and start the women up. He never completed the gesture, for two shots rang out and he sank to his knees on the deck, a dark stain spreading on the front of his uniform where one of the bullets had come clear through him. He held his hands clutched tight to his chest for a moment, though his bearded face showed nothing but incomprehension, then pitched face foremost onto the deck.

  “Hurry up!” a man shouted. “Let’s get out of here!”

  There was a concerted rush for the rail, and several clumsy fist fights ensued over who would be taken next. The seamen and officers who had been helping the women and children into the clumsy canvas seats had disappeared, and as the breeches buoys returned from the shore, the men jostled each other to get on them. Another shot sounded, and Katharine saw that a gang of seamen and even some of the black gang had armed themselves with pistols, knives, and belaying pins, and had obviously decided, in the absence of any authority, to save themselves first, something that would probably never have occurred to them if the captain hadn’t been shot.

  Katharine looked around for Thomas and was relieved to see no sign of him, for she was unsure how he would react. She did see Sam, however, standing white-faced and stunned almost between the two groups. As she looked at him, he stepped out to face the seamen.

  “Don’t be fools,” he admonished them. “They’ll tear you apart up on the cliffs.”

  “Let ’em try!” someone called, and amid the laughter that followed, another shot rang out.

  As Sam crumpled, both Katharine and Thomas, who had just reappeared on deck, ran to him, oblivious of the seamen, who were looking frightened and desperate now.

  “What a damned fool thing to do,” Thomas muttered, stripping off Sam’s coat to reveal a hole right in the middle of his chest but low, at the beginning of his diaphragm.

  “Someone has to stop them,” Sam said in a surprisingly clear voice, his eyes still closed.

  Katharine looked up involuntarily to see that the seamen were climbing into the breeches buoys while the first-class male passengers had retreated back toward the stern. She decided not to enlighten Sam. She looked questioningly at Thomas, who shook his head.

  “I can’t feel anything below my waist,” Sam said, unable to comprehend fully what had happened to him. He suddenly threw the upper part of his body to one side, as if to force the lower part to follow suit, but his legs lay limply still.

  “Lie back, Sam,” Thomas said gently. “The bullet has bruised the nerves in your spine, that’s all. It won’t last.”

  “I’m sorry, Christian,” Sam said then. “I never meant it to come to this, truly I didn’t.”

  Thomas looked puzzled, but a monstrous surmise entered Katharine’s mind. “It was you, Sam, who did it all, wasn’t it?”

  “I had to have the money, Christian. Clarice would have made it up to you, you wouldn’t have lost anything in the end. I only meant for the Circe to lose the race …”

  Before Katharine or Thomas could say anything in reply, there was a muffled explosion accompanied by a savage jolt, and a geyser of smoke and debris from the funnel near them billowed up into the air, dimming the sun for a moment before the bitter wind blew it away. The funnel slowly listed and at last lay crumpled across the deck, barring the way to three of the shore rescue lines. From below came a hideous chorus of shrieks and wails as the steerage passengers realized that those not already killed by the explosion or scalded to death would be drowned as the water level immediately began to rise when the side of the ship was blown out. The seamen sent below by the captain had allowed only some fifty of the emigrant women up on deck before barring the exit from steerage once again.

  As the water poured in, the Circe began to settle by the stern, and there could be heard the shriek of tortured metal as the change in angle pried her open around the rocks that pierced her side as if giant can openers had slit apart her iron sides. Holed mortally now on both sides and sinking by the stem that was now dragging her inexorably back off the rocks as her engine previously had been unable to do, the Circe gave off almost human groans as she slowly settled farther and farther into the deeper water.

  Thomas leaped to his feet, Sam all but forgotten. “Look!” he shouted, agonized.

  Katharine looked across the bow where Thomas was pointing to see what at first seemed to be a mass of flotsam from the ship’s hold. With horror she realized that the mass was in truth human, hundreds of people from the steerage washed out through the holed hull into the frigid sea. She could hear now the wails and cries for help. Beyond them the fleet of small boats from shore lay as before, none of them making any move to rescue the drowning.

  “I’ve got to go below and let the rest out if it isn’t too late,” Thomas told her. “But first I’ll put you on one of the breeches buoys.”

  “No, Thomas. I can’t leave now, there is too much to do.”

  The rescue lines were being stretched twanging tight as the ship listed farther and slid back away from shore. Thomas gave her an anguished look. “Goodbye, love,” he said unexpectedly, and the last thing she saw on the Circe was his fist drawn back to hit her.

  She came to choking and sputtering in water so cold that it felt painful rather than wet as a wave washed over her. She still instinctively clung to the buoy, though the line was no longer visible, and she realized that the line must have snapped when she was partway to shore. She had only a glimpse of the dying ship, half under water now, before a great comber streaming banners of white spray back from its crest in the stiff offshore wind bore her and the buoy up and up and forward until as it crested she could look over and see some twelve feet below her the foam-laced water being sucked up from shore into this new wave. Then her hold on the buoy was broken and she was buried and tumbled viciously about in the turbulence of the breaking wave.

  When she was sure that she could hold her breath no longer, her head broke the surface and she stopped struggling, allowing herself to be carried in to the narrow pebbled beach, where she crawled awkwardly out of the water, her sodden long skirt weighing her down. Exhausted, she sank down beyond the tideline and hopelessly watched the ship, capsized now onto her beam ends, pull finally clear of the deadly rocks and disappear except for the very tops of her masts, clumped thick with people desperately clinging to this last bit of safety, but buffeted cruelly by the waves.

  As she saw that the beach around her was littered already with unmoving shapeless bundles, she also saw that the fleet of small boats had belatedly moved in to the rescue now that the ship was indeed sunk. It was with unbelieving dismay that she watched the men in the boats grapple whatever salvageable materials from the sea they could find. When a corpse came up on their hooks they searched it for valuables and tossed it back, ignoring those few still alive who called weakly to them. Katharine had heard of wreckers — who hadn’t? — but the cold-blooded reality of them appalled her. Panic, impossibly heavy clothing, the strong offshore wind combined with an outgoing tide, and the coldness of the water had done in the greater part of those cast into the sea, close as they were to land, without any help from the scavengers.

  She must have sat for several hours, dazed and shivering even in the lee of the cliff through the early afternoon, watching numbly as the wreckers were at last joined by fishing boats from Halifax or nearer that took the remnants of survivors who had been clinging to the exposed masts and to various of the rocks in the bay. Meanwhile the beach on either side of her became littered with windrows of bodies washed up on the pebbly sand as the offshore wind switched gustily around to onshore too late to have saved hundreds of thos
e in the bitterly cold water.

  It wasn’t until midafternoon that someone on the clifftop organized a rope-and-sling operation to haul up the bodies from the beach. She rode up along with ten drowned souls to the top, where the dead were already laid out in rows. There must have been the better part of a hundred of them already, staring sightlessly at the mare’s-tail clouds in the afternoon sky, some who had washed ashore undamaged, others hideously mutilated by the grappling hooks that were the sole means of pulling them from the water, or by the rocks on which they had been battered by the surf. More were arriving all the time, drawn in carts up a track where the cliffs were not so abrupt. With the blanket someone had given her wrapped around her now almost dried clothing, Katharine walked down the rows of the dead like a somnambulist, here and there recognizing someone she had spoken with or knew. There was Molly O’Donnell’s husband, survivor of the fever, who would now never make his way in the New World; there was the dispensary steward, James Harker; there were the two infant typhus patients side by side. Unconsciously she felt her bruised jaw. There was the man from first class who had challenged the captain; there was the purser.

  She watched through the rest of the afternoon as body after body was laid out in the short scrubby grass. She recognized Sam, and the captain, and, greatest wrench of all, Molly O’Donnell, who had lost everything on that doomed voyage and now her life as well. One Katharine thought might have been Christian, but the face and head were so mutilated it was impossible to tell. The hair looked darker and lank, but in that welter of blood and salt water and sand there was no telling what the original color really was. The dungarees were the same, however, and the peajacket. She finally passed on with a shudder, not wanting to know, not able to bear the thought of what she might feel were she to ascertain once and for all that this battered, hardly human corpse was in truth Christian, whose all but overpowering impression was always one of life and vitality. She heard in her head the echo of his laugh and hurried on.

  Time after time Katharine was urged to join the stream of wagons and carriages and coaches that were now engaged in taking the living to Halifax. They were to return later with coffins bought, lent, knocked together, into which the dead would be placed to be taken in their turn to Halifax. Always she refused. She could no longer even have said for what she was waiting; she only knew through her shock and grief and exhaustion that she must go on looking.

  The light was failing when they brought up a new lot of bodies off the small boats, but it wasn’t so dark that she couldn’t see that one of them was Thomas, one side of his face laid open by the cruel hooks, but the other untouched as if he were asleep. No one paid any attention when she sank down beside him and took him in her arms. There were, after all, dozens of such scenes, as those living who had insisted upon staying while the dead were laid out recognized a dear one and sought somehow to breathe warmth and life into the still cold figures that lay so quietly under the darkening sky.

  Chapter VI

  SHIPWRECK TAKES 500 LIVES! the headlines of the Halifax Record shouted. Katharine read the accompanying account with unbelieving eyes. How was it possible even for a newspaper to get things so wrong?

  It was learned yesterday that the Circe, the steam passenger vessel that broke up and sank with some 850 souls aboard, ran out of coal off the coast of Nova Scotia less than twenty miles from Halifax on Friday. Helpless without her engines, she drifted onto a lee shore and broke up before the gaze of hundreds of horrified onlookers who watched powerless from the cliffs near Meagher’s Head, at the end of Point Prospect.

  It is reported by reputable sources that even before she was thrown on the cruel rocks, her captain and one of her passengers had been shot and killed by mutineers among the crew, who then proceeded to rescue themselves while leaving the hapless passengers to drown. Another report states that the crew was initially enraged by the fact that Judgment Christian Hand, owner of the Circe and a passenger aboard her on this fatal maiden voyage, saved himself by taking the only seaworthy whaleboat and making for shore. The present whereabouts of Mr. Hand is unknown, and he is presumed to have been lost when the boat capsized in the heavy surf that later hampered rescue operations …

  Later on, The Record wishes to congratulate all those noble souls who raced to the scene of the wreck and so ably carried out the rescue of the 350 who survived …

  Katharine gave a bitter little smile. There was no mention of the noble souls who had raced to the scene of the wreck simply to scavenge. By the following morning, there was a thriving marketplace set up on the cliffs for peddling all manner of salvage: pieces of the ship itself as souvenirs, furniture, life preservers, trunks and suitcases, clothing, all kinds of personal possessions, even toys. There was no dearth of customers, either. By the hundreds the morbidly curious drove out to the scene of the disaster to gawk at the dead who were still waiting transport to Halifax and to paw over the pitiful remains of the ship and her passengers, looking for bargains and conversation pieces. The Circe was well named, Katharine thought bitterly, for she had indeed turned men into swine.

  The newspaper article went on to say that a court of inquiry would be convened within the week to attempt to place the blame where it belonged while witnesses were still at hand. Apparently eyewitnesses were even now being subpoenaed to ensure their presence when the court opened. Strange that no one had subpoenaed her yet, Katharine wondered. You would think that the personal secretary of the missing man upon whom they hoped to place so much of the blame would be among the first called. Aaron Fine and Captain Richard Poulson were listed as spokesmen for the Blue Hand Company. How Christian would have enjoyed seeing that diehard old advocate of sailing ships standing up for a stinker, as he termed the steamships.

  Well, let them squabble it out themselves. She for one didn’t care. She floated in a kind of emotional limbo, partly brought on by shock and grief, partly by her sudden lack of a future. Though she had saved money, it was hardly enough to be called a nest egg, and she was back in the unenviable position of being an unemployed female secretary with no credentials. The Blue Hand Company was at the moment paying her hotel and food bills, but she doubted that would continue for long. After that, there was nothing but a long blankness before her. She turned her mind determinedly toward the eggs she had been pushing absently about her plate.

  “Miss Howard?”

  She looked up, startled, to find one of the most handsome men she had ever seen looking down at her. Beside him, Charles’s conventional good looks would pale to insignificance. He appeared to be in his early forties, black hair frosted with gray at the temples, a bold nose, a beautifully cut sensuous mouth, and dark eyes that were almost hypnotic.

  “You have the advantage of me, sir,” she said hesitantly, completely taken aback by this magnificent stranger.

  “I am Aaron Fine, Benjamin Fine’s son. I would have contacted you sooner, only you were unfortunately listed as among the dead. We are still trying to sort out who survived and who didn’t.” Unasked, he sat down. “I am hoping that you may be able to help us with that and with a number of other points as well.”

  “Then Mr. Hand is still among the missing?”

  He nodded.

  She sighed. She wasn’t free yet, it seemed. “Of course I’ll do all I can to help you.”

  “As you indicated, the most important item is whether or not Christian Hand is alive.”

  “He couldn’t be. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I might have seen him up there on the cliffs … afterward.”

  “Thought? Wouldn’t you have known?”

  “As you are apparently not aware, there were many of the bodies that were unrecognizable.”

  “Tell me about the last you saw of him.”

  She told him of the attempt to take the first line to shore, and of the capsizing of the boat in the surf.

  “How was the line then taken to the top of the cliffs? Who did it?”

  “I have no way of knowing. I was in the dispensary when t
he boat was cast ashore.”

  “If we could only find out for sure …”

  “What about the people on the cliffs? Surely one of them could say.”

  It was his turn to shake his head. “They were all local people, relatives of the men in the small boats.” He saw by her expression that he didn’t have to elaborate. “They wouldn’t even admit to being there.” He shrugged. “Well, we’ll just have to do the best we can. I’ll let you know when we need you for the court of inquiry.”

  “Mr. Fine? I know I’m being impertinent, but why are you involved in all this?”

  “My father is a stockholder in the company, and I have just become engaged to be married to Lady Fotheringay. Miriam — Arabella, that is — is particularly concerned as to the possibility of Christian Hand’s survival.”

  She began to laugh helplessly. “Poor Christian, he wouldn’t believe he never stood a chance. I don’t think she could take the idea of living with someone from her past.” His answering smile was enigmatic. “Oh, but he did indeed stand a chance. It was my good fortune that he put himself out of the running.”

  Katharine wondered dully why Arabella was telling that silly story. She remembered Christian’s taking Arabella in his arms that night a thousand years ago. She changed the subject. “Do you wish me to make any inquiries? I’m afraid that those closest to him are all dead.” Thomas, Thomas, how I miss you …

  “No, we’re doing all that can be done there. If you happen to remember anything more, however, I’ll appreciate it no end. We’re going to have an uphill battle at best.”

  After he had gone, she hurriedly signed the meal chit and ventured forth to the offices of the Halifax Record, where she asked if she might see the list of those known to have perished in the wreck. Since those she cared about most she had already been all too aware of, she hadn’t bothered to read the list. She was grimly amused to find her own name, but nowhere did she find that of Roger McMahan. When last seen, he had been in the boat with Christian. Who had told her that? Thomas?