The Midnight Watch

by David Dyer

  A large grandfather clock chimed away the quarter-hours. It was a pleasant scene: one old man sharing his memories with another, two dutiful children patiently listening. It was, as Lord himself might have described it, most convivial. But it was time for me to bring things into sharper focus.

  ‘You were also, I think, captain of the Californian?’

  It was inelegant, and Lord turned sharply. He blinked and opened wide his cloudy eyes, and I had again the sense that perhaps he could not see me, that my daughter and I for him were only blurs and shadows.

  ‘I was,’ he said. ‘And what of it?’

  I had to be careful. The scrap log page lay in my pocket, and I needed to find a way to make him read it. ‘I wondered only whether, perhaps, you’d kept up with any of the men you sailed with on that ship?’

  ‘No,’ said Lord. ‘None of them. I saw Mr Groves once – in Australia, I think it was – and Mr Stewart I saw some years ago in Liverpool.’ He sat thinking for a while. ‘The whole business was an outrage, of course.’

  ‘What business do you mean?’

  ‘The Titanic.’ He still pronounced the name in his own strange way, Ti-tar-nic. From his mouth it sounded like the name of a caustic chemical.

  ‘So Lord Mersey got it wrong?’

  ‘Of course he did. He wanted a bloody goat, and I was it. The whole thing is a damned shame.’

  Lord now spoke freely and quickly: about how he’d been portrayed in the recent movie, how someone at the Mercantile Marine Service Association in Liverpool had helped him to lodge a formal complaint, how his name would soon be cleared once and for all. He didn’t need Lord Mersey or anyone else to tell him about the Californian and what she saw. He had been there, on the spot, and he knew they didn’t see any Titanic. A ship like that at sea was an utter impossibility to mistake.

  His voice had grown in power and volume. Its deep timbre seemed to infuse every particle of air in the room with its vibration. He still had an uncanny power to possess a space. I was reminded of the way he’d enthralled the Boston pressmen with his lilting voice that flowed around us like a warm breeze. He seemed now as he did then: trustworthy, persuasive, believable. He was animated by his innocence.

  ‘But what about the rockets?’ I asked.

  He turned to me slowly, as if he’d forgotten I was there. Tutty stood up, as a warning to me, perhaps, not to go too far.

  ‘The rockets?’ Lord repeated.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The rockets seen by your ship.’

  ‘They were from another ship,’ he said. ‘Another ship firing rockets. My man at the association has worked it all out.’

  I waited a moment to let his point settle. ‘And the ship seen by the Titanic – that was not you?’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘There were two ships, then, between you and the Titanic?’

  ‘Two ships.’

  ‘So, four ships altogether?’

  ‘Yes. Four ships!’

  He was triumphant. He was looking over my head in his old way, as if addressing an audience in the middle distance. Harriet and I glanced at each other. She was as surprised, I think, as I was: we had expected anger from this man, or a refusal to speak at all about the Titanic, not this energy. Lord was in a heightened state; he seemed almost thrilled. There was not one sign of remorse, not a hint of regret, not a single note of sadness. There was still no admission that he’d done wrong, only a very great certainty that he was right.

  Now, I thought, was the time to do what I’d promised Mrs Stone. But Tutty had moved to take up a position behind his father’s chair, and before I could reach into my pocket, he announced it was time for his father’s walk.

  Tutty bustled us into his father’s old Austin and drove us to New Brighton, at the mouth of the Mersey. People of the Wirral, Tutty said, came here to breathe the sea air and be revived by the spirit of the great river. The water was vast and grey, but the lowering sun threw warm colours generously onto the opposite bank. We strolled slowly along a wide promenade. Harriet took the old captain’s arm to guide him gently, leaning her head into his shoulder from time to time. Tutty and I walked a few paces behind. His father’s eyesight was failing, Tutty said, and he had other problems too – his heart, his kidneys – but his legs were still strong.

  Tutty told me he’d been so very annoyed when his father took himself off on the ferry to Liverpool to complain to the marine association about the Titanic movie. The young man at the association had taken the case up with such gusto that his father now spent his days gathering documents, swearing affidavits and writing letters. The project animated him, but it exhausted Tutty. He wondered when it would all end. ‘If Mother were here,’ he said, ‘she would have told Father to leave it well alone. She never spoke of it, you know. Not once, in all those years.’ He paused a moment then added, ‘And nor did I.’

  A mile or so behind us was the silhouette of an amusement park with rides that Tutty had heard of, he told me, but never ridden – the Big Dipper, Helter Skelter, the Big Wheel – but they were all quiet now. The season was long over. Ahead, in the river itself, was a low granite battlement linked to the shore by a platform of glistening green stone, which was exposed by the low tide. ‘It’s called the Rock Battery,’ Tutty said, blowing his nose into a red silk handkerchief.

  We arrived at a wooden bench with a commanding view of the battery and Liverpool Bay beyond. I was getting very tired. The light was fading, but the twilight would last an hour yet. Gulls swooped and soared; men shouted from distant boats. Children still played on the rocks, poking sticks into crevices and collecting muddy shells in woollen hats. Tutty helped his father onto the bench and I sat next to him. Lord struck his walking stick twice on the ground and called for Tutty to get us all some tea from a vendor in a motor van. Harriet offered to walk with him, and the two set off together.

  And so, forty-seven years after I first met this stern British captain and began to seek out his story, we sat alone together and stared out to the sea that had tricked him so cruelly.

  We chatted quietly for a while. He replied to me sometimes in odd ways, so that my words seemed like stones dropped down a dark well. I never knew quite where they went, or when I might hear a splash.

  ‘Funny,’ I said to him, ‘things seem smaller to me now. I find, at our age, only the important things resonate. All the rest … is nothing.’

  ‘I can’t see the river any more,’ he said, ‘but I can hear it. I know it is ebbing, just by the sound.’

  When I looked closely I saw that he was right: the vast grey surface of the river was moving almost imperceptibly seaward. But what, I wondered, could he hear? The water was perfectly calm. No ships or ferries disturbed the surface and there was no wind to whip up wavelets. Even the gulls had settled.

  ‘It is kind of you, Captain Lord, to talk to me, but I wonder whether you know who I really am? Do you know that I’m John Steadman, the man who published the donkeyman’s affidavit against you, all those years ago?’

  He waved a hand impatiently. ‘Oh yes, yes, of course,’ he said, but I didn’t think at all that he did know. I pressed him further. ‘And do you know that Mr Stone, your second officer, has died?’

  He seemed puzzled by the question. ‘I don’t know anything about him.’

  ‘He has, I think, been sending you letters?’

  Lord hesitated. ‘I have never read any letters from that man. None at all.’

  The page from the scrap log still lay in my pocket, thin and fragile as rice paper. I thought of Herbert Stone’s tentative, pencilled words – ‘Informed Master by speaking tube’ – and wondered if now was the time to produce them, but Lord suddenly asked, ‘Do you know your Bible, Mr Steadman?’

  ‘I’m from Boston,’ I said in answer.

  ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth. They got rid of me from that ship, Mr Steadman, but Mr Stone stayed on.’

  I turned to him. His eyebrows were raised and his clouded eyes stared blank
ly at me. He held his hands out, palms up, inviting me to ponder one of the great mysteries of the world.

  We were at the nub of the matter. As I sat there on the bench with him, watching Tutty in the distance struggle with cardboard teacups, I thought back to the time all those years ago when Lord had struggled to push his son’s pram through the doorway of his home. I’d seen then an expression on his face that I’d not quite been able to read – a contortion of his sharp nose, a drawing-down of his eyebrows, a grim tightening of his lips. But now, as my memory returned, I suddenly knew what I’d seen. It was a deep and abiding disgust at his coddled, whimpering son, and all the weak creatures of God’s earth.

  All his life Lord had despised the weakness of others – the apprentices who’d drunk wine and slept with Chilean prostitutes; the officers who’d trained in steam, not sail; the dithering, timid Mr Stone. Yet Mr Stone had kept his place, while he, the capable commander, had been sacrificed.

  I saw it clearly. When Stone called down on the speaking tube that night, talking of rockets in a tentative, feeble voice, Lord heard weakness. He may have thought of his son, who would not walk by himself, who wanted always to be pushed in his pram, who clung to his mother and turned away from his father. In those moments in his cabin, not knowing anything about the Titanic or her fate, not knowing he had only minutes to act, he wanted Stone to do what an officer of the watch should do: use his initiative and find out what was wrong.

  And on that freezing bridge above, Herbert Stone heard his captain’s gruff annoyance and did not want to anger him further. Perhaps he heard in Lord’s voice something of his own overbearing father, who’d stuffed rags in his mouth and made him watch kittens drown in a bag. He was worried about the rockets, but he’d told Lord about them, and that was enough.

  So responsibility for action fell like a snowflake from the sky, landing gently between them, touching neither. And in this concentrated moment in history, nothing was done.

  Those rockets! Unanswered then and unanswerable ever after.

  A moist air drifted up to keep Lord and me warm. Sharp edges gave way to gentle shades of green and grey and blue. Somewhere far out to sea were thunderstorms; I could see lightning dancing and flickering on the horizon. From the deep past a thought came to me: There is energy all around. And perhaps it came to Harriet too, because I could see her in the distance – still beautiful and radiant in her sixties – with her back to us, standing still and looking out to the horizon’s lively light.

  The captain and I sat quietly for a moment. The dusk was deepening, the twilight almost over. Out in the bay a haze had developed, hanging low over the outgoing tide. Lord turned to me and I saw again the cloudy opacity of his eyes. Their pupils were flaring open, as if trying to adjust to the fading light.

  ‘You say you have someone helping you,’ I asked, ‘at the mercantile association?’

  ‘Oh yes. A young man. He has figured it all out. It was not the Titanic we saw.’

  I paused. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Of course it wasn’t. Absolutely it could not have been. As you say, a ship like that, at night, could never be mistaken.’

  Lord lowered his eyebrows and blinked quickly, as if suddenly confused. Was I mocking him? I reached out and took both his hands in mine. His skin was loose and papery beneath my touch, but I could feel the iron strength of the bones beneath. I thought he might withdraw his hands, but he did not. I held them for a full minute, and then another.

  And they were as I expected: warm – quite, quite warm.

  A Note on the Writing of The Midnight Watch

  The Midnight Watch is a work of fiction based on true events. Much of what is described in the novel is the result of careful research and represents my best guess as to what actually happened during the Californian’s voyage and afterwards. Other parts of the novel are pure invention, and some parts are a blend of fact and fiction.

  John Steadman is entirely my own creation. The Boston American, however, was a real newspaper and was the paper that broke the Californian story by publishing Ernest Gill’s affidavit. All quoted newspaper stories and headlines are true, and much of what is said in the novel’s various press encounters is taken directly from contemporaneous newspaper reports. I have based my portraits of Philip Franklin, Senator Smith, Sydney Buxton, Lord Mersey, Sir Rufus Isaacs and other minor figures on historical sources, but the IMM Boston agent Jack Thomas is entirely a product of my imagination.

  John and Annie Sage and their nine children were a real family who died in the Titanic disaster. Little is known about what happened to them, but what I offer is a likely scenario based on the few facts we have and a close reading of inquiry transcripts.

  Captain Lord, Herbert Stone and the other members of the Californian crew were real people. I have tried to offer authentic representations of them, but have added colour and depth with my own imagining of their thoughts and emotions and some elements of their backstories. Their evidence before the American and British inquiries I have taken verbatim from the transcript, with occasional minor alterations for clarity. One liberty I have taken is to attribute to Herbert Stone a fascination with illustrations of Moby-Dick that were not in fact published until 1930. I did this because I love the way these images so powerfully convey the ‘heartless voids and immensities of the universe’, and the tragedy of a man who did his very best to remain loyal to a flawed skipper.

  I encourage readers interested in learning more about ‘The Californian Incident’ to visit my website (daviddyer.com.au).

  Acknowledgements

  An early version of this novel was written as part of a doctorate in creative arts at the University of Technology, Sydney, and I would like to acknowledge the invaluable instruction and guidance of my supervisors Delia Falconer and Debra Adelaide. I am grateful too for the wonderful assistance and astute advice of my agent Gaby Naher. My particular thanks go to George Witte and his team at St. Martin’s Press for so enthusiastically embracing this novel, and to Meredith Rose for her meticulous editing and unfailing good humour. I must also thank my dear friends John Borrow, Rita Mallia, Heinz Schweers, Colan Leach and Jenny Wells for reading early manuscripts, and the lovely staff and students of Kambala school for their warm support during the writing of this book.

  Finally, I thank my mother and father for their patient indulgence of my many years of Titanic obsession.

  About the Author

  David Dyer was born and raised in Shellharbour, a small coastal town in New South Wales, Australia. He has served as an officer in the Australian merchant navy and worked as a litigation lawyer at the firm that represented the owners of the Titanic in the aftermath of the disaster. His access to countless documents and artifacts has informed and inspired his work in The Midnight Watch. He lives in central Sydney and Katoomba, a small mountain town in New South Wales. You can sign up for email updates here.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  PART TWO

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  EIGHT WHITE ROCKETS

  EPILOGUE

  A Note on the Writing of THE MIDNIGHT WATCHr />
  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  THE MIDNIGHT WATCH. Copyright © 2016 by David Dyer. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

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  First published in Australia by Penguin Australia Pty Ltd

  First U.S. Edition: April 2016

  eISBN 9781466893085

  First eBook edition: April 2016