The Midnight Watch

by David Dyer

  ‘Are you quite certain?’ I asked.

  ‘I am,’ he said. ‘I did not notify the captain of any rockets, because I did not see any. Nobody on our ship saw any.’

  My next question was impertinent, but I felt honour-bound to put it. ‘Mr Stone, has the captain made you say these things?’

  Stone did not hesitate. ‘No,’ he said, ‘he has not made me say them. He hasn’t made me do anything. He is a good captain.’

  Such loyalty! I paused. I could not think what else to ask him. Thomas moved quickly to the centre of the room, clapped his hands and said, ‘That’s that, then. Everything’s resolved. Thank you, gentlemen.’

  Herbert Stone disappeared down the alleyway, and Lord walked into his cabin and closed the door behind him. The marshal said he would wait where he was and the two other reporters rushed off to file their stories. Old Frank ambled along after them down the alleyway, muttering to himself.

  Jack Thomas surprised me by inviting me for a drink in the ship’s dining saloon while he waited for Lord. ‘You see, old boy?’ he said, generously pouring bourbon into my glass. ‘The captain is telling the truth after all. His second officer says so. You’ve been misled by that grubby boy from the engine room.’

  ‘That grubby boy,’ I said, ‘is on his way to Washington as we speak, and tomorrow he will tell Senator Smith all he knows. Under oath.’

  ‘He knows nothing.’

  ‘He knows enough. And I wonder what the captain will say about the rockets when he is under oath.’

  ‘John, old boy, Smith doesn’t care about the rockets! He cares only that brave Captain Lord and his wireless man tried to warn the Titanic and the Titanic ignored them. Franklin tells me Smith was in a rage about it. Furious! That’s why subpoenas were issued, and that, old boy, is what our captain will tell the world. Under oath.’

  Perhaps Thomas was right. After all, Stone, the watcher of the rockets, hadn’t been called to Washington. ‘We shall see,’ I said.

  Thomas looked at me across the table and finished his drink in one long, aerated slurp. ‘You know, John,’ he said, ‘I am trying my very best to forgive you. But you do make it difficult.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, likewise draining my bourbon in a single gulp, and holding it out for a refill. ‘Now, tell me. What train did you say the captain was catching?’

  ‘The midnight special.’ Thomas eyed me closely. ‘The marshal will take him along to the station. Why do you ask?’

  ‘No reason,’ I said, slowly stirring my bourbon with a pencil.

  Part Two

  CHAPTER 14

  I had not forgotten Krupp’s demand that I file a story that night, but he’d been expecting Lord to be carted off to jail, not sent triumphant to the nation’s capital by luxury train. So I didn’t file, but instead made my way to South Station and followed the captain onto the midnight train to Washington. That, surely, was what Krupp would have wanted.

  I have always known just how easy it is to fool people with a simple disguise. Wear a starched blue shirt and pin a polished silver star to your chest and you can direct traffic at the busiest intersection in Boston. Hobble on a walking stick and courteous folk will open doors for you. So I always kept in my satchel a pair of plain-glass spectacles, a woollen cap, and a false moustache and beard, and once I was aboard the train I put them on. Bourbon had made me brave. I felt like getting into the cage with the lion.

  Jack Thomas had booked Lord a sleeper berth, but the midnight service offered a late supper and I found him sitting alone in the dining car. Cyril Evans was nowhere to be seen. When I took the seat opposite the captain, he showed no sign of recognising me so I stroked my beard, ordered a drink and offered to buy him one too. He refused. ‘I never drink,’ he said, ‘except for a port wine at Christmas. One glass.’

  ‘If you spent Christmas with my wife’s family,’ I said in my best Texan accent, ‘as I am compelled to do, you’d need more than one glass to get through, yes sir!’

  Lord gave a polite smile but then begged my pardon and turned to the window. He was tired, he said, so must be excused from conversation. I apologised profusely.

  ‘My wife,’ I added, ‘says it is my very worst sin, the way I just prattle on and on, with no one wantin’ to listen!’ I said that of course he must be silent and restful and ignore me altogether.

  Some time passed.

  ‘Although,’ I said, ‘I can hear an accent, and am mighty curious about what might have brought a man such as y’self to this part of the world at this hour.’

  ‘I am a sea captain,’ Lord said. ‘From England.’

  ‘What a grand thing!’ I said. ‘A very grand thing.’

  Lord turned towards me a little. I thought he might ask me again to be quiet, but my jovial talk and the gentle swaying of the train seemed to open him up a little. He listened and nodded when I said that my father was a yachtsman, that I was heading south to spend some days with him on the Chesapeake. ‘But I know nothing of the water, no sir,’ I said. ‘Not like you, sir.’

  ‘I do know something of it,’ Lord said.

  I bubbled and frothed as a woman might, asking him what it was like to be in a storm, what exotic places he had visited, and by slow gradations this reserved British captain began to talk to me. He was, as he claimed, tired, and there were periods of long silence, but on his topics of interest he became voluble, even warm. His supper arrived, and as he ate he told me something of growing up amid the vast cotton mills of Lancashire, of proving to his father that he could be as brave as his four older brothers, of his mother’s cold and bony hands gripping his own every morning to give strength to his prayers. His brothers went into textiles, but at thirteen he went to sea as a midshipman on sailing ships. He told me about Cape Horn storms and how, in calmer weather, he would lie flat on the yards and listen to the sails snap and crack beneath him. It was God’s workplace, he said. He was sitting upright in his seat, his starched collar buttoned stiffly and his hat in his lap. From this close distance I saw just how noble was his face, with its angular structure, piercing eyes and large forehead rising to a bald crown.

  For a while, he seemed to forget I was there. He spoke as if addressing a far-off audience – his mother and father, perhaps, or their sacred memory. He spoke of his mother’s bible, and told me how, when the other midshipmen went ashore in Chile’s Talcahuano Bay to visit honey-skinned women, he would use it to keep himself strong. When the boys came back to the ship drunk and boasting of sinful things he would take it with him to the open deck above, look up at the masts and yards, and think about the majesty of the wind and sea.

  ‘But things are not now as they were under sail,’ he said, his face lit by the electric flashes of passing signals. ‘Sail bred discipline. One wrong move on a yard and things were over for you. Steam has brought with it a certain … laxity. It’s hard these days to get good officers.’ He spoke softly, as if voicing a profound inner knowledge. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘steam makes men soft.’

  He told me that he sailed as second officer when he was only nineteen, that he obtained his First Mate’s Certificate when he was twenty. He was appointed to his first command when he was only twenty-eight years old. ‘Most uncommon, you know,’ he said, ‘to get command so young.’

  Lord asked me no questions about my own life. I was glad. I was too tired myself to invent tales of sailing on the Chesapeake. Moreover our train was hurtling onwards and Lord must soon retire for the night, so I tried to guide him to more revealing topics.

  I asked about his family. His wife was wonderful and grand, he said, but – and here his face gave a little grimace – his young son was sickly. He turned the subject to golf. When home, he played every Thursday afternoon at the Wallasey golf course. ‘For the game, you understand, not for the social side.’ Wallasey, he explained, was across the river from Liverpool.

  I ordered more bourbon and asked more questions. I felt I was getting nearer to him, that I was following well enough my daughter’s
advice to ‘find out what sort of man he is’. Behind the cover of my disguise I began to feel the full power of his charm. How different this man was to that trapped, defiant figure in the Californian’s chartroom! Attack him and he hardens, I thought; flatter him gently and he opens up like one of those giant exotic plants that turn their fronds ever so slowly to the sun.

  I drank my drink and dabbed at my lips, wondering how I might bring him round to talking about his officers. In what ways had steam made them soft? Did he have anyone in particular in mind? But then I looked with horror at my napkin. Sitting in it was my moustache. I tried quickly to replace it but I was too late. Lord reached forward and took off my glasses.

  ‘You are the newspaper man!’ he said. ‘From Boston.’

  I nodded, peeling away my false beard. I was embarrassed, but also a little relieved.

  ‘I ought to have known,’ he said tiredly. ‘You Americans have no manners and no honour. None at all.’

  I met his gaze and waited. I tried to see what was beneath. He seemed, suddenly, to be young. I thought for a moment that he might say something more; that he wanted, perhaps, to tell me everything. ‘I can help you, you know,’ I said as gently as I could. ‘I will write whatever you want me to write.’

  He leaned closer. His hand moved a little, as if to reach out to shake mine. His eyes were red. I don’t think he’d slept for days. ‘I do not know whose interests you serve,’ he said in a harsh whisper, ‘or why you hound me as you do, but I will say not one more word to you.’ He stood up, his supper half finished, and walked away down the aisle.

  The train rattled and swayed, and as Lord closed the carriage door behind him, I thought for some reason of the Bremen and all that she had seen, and I felt a soft glow of anger. I may be an American, without manners or honour, but I knew exactly whose interests I served.

  For a time, as I sipped bourbon and watched the silvery landscape slip by outside, I wondered why Lord hadn’t found any bodies. In my indignant mood I wondered whether he’d searched for them at all. He said he had, but was he lying about that too, just as he was lying about the rockets? It was a conundrum, but the solution came as I sat alone in that dining car rattling south to Washington. Knowing I wouldn’t sleep, I gathered up some newspapers from the central vestibule and surrounding seats. I read about the evidence given so far in the inquiry, including Mr Boxhall’s account of his firing of rockets. They ‘go right up into the air and they throw stars,’ he’d said. But it was a small article buried deep that gave me the clue I needed. A bedroom steward had told the senators in Washington how, after the Titanic sank, the passengers in his lifeboat rowed towards the lights of a ship. ‘We kept pulling and pulling until daybreak,’ he explained. ‘Then we saw the Carpathia coming up, and we turned around and came back to her.’ I soon found similar reports in other papers: lifeboats trying to reach a light during the night hours, and turning around only when the Carpathia arrived at dawn.

  I ought to have thought of it earlier: once the Titanic sank, her lifeboats had rowed towards the Californian, so that stroke by stroke a gap opened up between them and the silent, floating dead. At dawn, the Carpathia made her way to these lifeboats, and the Californian made her way to the Carpathia. Lord saw no bodies because he was never at the wreck site. It was simple, really. And when I checked my notes of what Cyril Evans had told me, I saw that the wreckage he described – an oar, a lifejacket, a shawl – could easily have come from the lifeboats, not the ship.

  But even if I knew why Lord had not found the Titanic’s dead, I was no closer to knowing why he hadn’t gone to them while they were yet living. This, I hoped as the new day approached, was just what the Washington senators would find out.

  * * *

  I worried a little for Lord when he said that we Americans have no manners and no honour. I hoped he wouldn’t say such things to the grand senators of Washington.

  The British had, after all, set the city alight during the War of 1812 – an act of monstrous petulance – and every Washington schoolchild knew the cry of the invading British commander: ‘I will make a cow pasture of these Yankee Capitol grounds!’ It might have all been a hundred years ago, but the ashes of the White House, the Capitol Building and the Treasury could still be tasted on the wind from time to time. And now this: a British ship with a British captain driven recklessly to her doom so that Washington’s best men were drowned. Clarence Moore, master of the Chevy Chase hunt, was dead, and President Taft’s sorrow for Archibald Butt was that of a bereaved brother. He was said to wander the White House in tears, asking to be left alone.

  The Titanic’s officers had been spat upon when they got off the train at Union Station. None of them had come voluntarily – they had all been subpoenaed. They pushed out their chests, clenched their fists and fought back. ‘We welcome this inquiry,’ fifth officer Harry Lowe had said, ‘but you Americans got up against us, and now we Britishers are up against you, and we shall see how it comes out!’ I laughed when I read this in the newspapers. Mr Lowe seemed intent on making a cow pasture of the Capitol grounds all over again.

  But Washington is an unyielding, indestructible sort of place – all that marble, all those hard, bright edges, all that whiteness – and as I say, I worried a little for Captain Lord. He seemed vulnerable as he stood in the main hall of Union Station in the late morning, dressed in a plain blue day suit, staring straight ahead. Tall as he was, he was still dwarfed by the great white arches that soared a hundred feet above him. Their inlaid gold octagons shone down on him like a thousand suns.

  Cyril Evans stood two or three yards behind him, pasting down his hair with the back of his hands like a cat cleaning itself. Soon, under oath, he would at last have his chance to tell the world how, on the morning the Titanic sank, he’d had precedence. Certainly Jack Binns had never spoken at such an auspicious venue.

  I watched the two men from a distance. Jack Thomas had told them that a Washington representative of IMM would meet them from the train, but there was not yet any sign of him. Lord and Evans were alone.

  I waited, but when no one came I decided to wait no longer. I stepped outside into the bright sunshine and struck out on foot for the Capitol.

  I arrived at the Senate Office Building on Constitution Avenue just before one o’clock. The building was new and enormous, with towering columns and lofty facades of polished marble and limestone. Inside, an usher showed me to the Committee on Territories room, where the inquiry was being held, but told me I couldn’t go in yet – the room was full. The luncheon adjournment was only a few minutes away and I could try my luck in the afternoon session.

  I sat on one of the polished cedar benches of the anteroom. I could hear muffled voices engaged in the steady rhythm of question and answer. The questioner, I knew, was Senator Smith of Michigan, but in time I began also to recognise the singsong lilt of Ernie Gill. Soon the questioning stopped, the door was flung open and Gill hurried out with the crowd, weaving through clumps of strolling women. I followed him as he slipped along the wide corridors to the top of the steps leading down to the avenue. He paused, taking in the grand vista that lay before him. When I called to him he turned, smiled, and held out his hand to shake mine. His face was flushed; he was triumphant. He told me Senator Smith had read out his affidavit to everyone in the room, and he, Ernie Gill of Liverpool, had sworn that every word of it was true.

  ‘Do you know the captain is on his way here now?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Mr Franklin has been giving evidence about it.’

  ‘Aren’t you going to stay and hear what he says?’

  ‘I don’t need to. I saw the rockets. He didn’t.’ Gill smoothed his great shaggy moustache with his forefinger and thumb. What a strange world it was, I thought, that this small man from the engine room of a British tramp steamer should find himself addressing senators of the United States Congress. I remembered Gill telling me that he’d been good at public speaking at school, that he’d learned the Rule of Three, and that
the other boys had listened to him. Today he could not have hoped for a more esteemed audience. The giant dome of Capitol building loomed close, and behind him, in the middle distance, the Washington Monument shone white and glorious in the vibrant light of early afternoon. We stood at the centre of the nation.

  Gill lit a cigarette. At the curb below an automobile drew up and three passengers alighted, two of whom, I saw, were Stanley Lord and Cyril Evans in their suits and bowler hats. The third was no doubt the IMM man. They began to walk up the stairs, and in moments would be at the place where Gill and I stood.

  I thought Gill might step away – there was still time – but he kept his position, smoking his cigarette, until he stood face to face with his captain. Lord, if he was surprised to see us, did not show it. Evans and the IMM man held back, but Lord was only a yard or so away. None of us spoke. We stood in a triangle, waiting, as if we were the last remaining pieces in a chess game. I wondered whether, in England, some rule of etiquette required a man’s accusers to speak first.

  I remembered what Gill had told me his ironmonger father once said: apply enough heat and anything will bend. For Lord there must have been some heat in Gill’s presence, but there he stood, unbendable as granite. And it was Lord, at last, who spoke first.

  ‘Smoking above decks again, donkeyman?’

  I saw a flicker of confusion, almost panic, in Gill’s face. The captain addressing him this way seemed at a stroke to re-establish the natural order of things. Gill was back down in the engine room once more, amid the filthy coal and smouldering clinkers.

  ‘I came, I saw them, and…’ Gill seemed to choke on his words. He repeated them, as if trying to recall a third and clinching phrase to trump his captain.

  But Lord would not be trumped. He did something I hadn’t seen him do before: he laughed. ‘And what, donkeyman? You conquered?’ He laughed again and stepped past us both towards the building’s great double doors. Evans and the IMM man followed him, leaving Gill and me alone. Gill was blinking and frowning. I took his hand and shook it.