“What do you mean?” Eleonora whispered.
“What’s that?” the stoker asked.
“What do you mean, you didn’t know it was serious?”
“Beggin’ your pardon, Missus, but I don’t know if you’d want to hear my tale. It’s not for a lady’s ear.” Eliana wondered why the man had started if he wasn’t going to bother telling the story. Though, perhaps he, too, had noticed how many men were in the boat, and had forgotten that he was in the presence among women.
“Tell us regardless,” Eleonora commanded. Eliana was surprised at her mother’s steely determination; she’d expected her mother’s voice to be weary, as she’d been sobbing silently since they’d left the boat. Eliana didn’t know why; everyone in her family was surely on a lifeboat. They wouldn’t have waited, and if this many crew and steerage passengers filled Eliana’s boat, that surely meant that, at the very least, every first-and-second class passenger had made it safely off.
“It is better to hear your tale than to listen to this ungodly noise,” Eliana admitted. The Titanic was still making an awful racket – like the fireman said, as if she were being ripped in two. Please make it stop, she prayed. She hoped the screams would silence, too.
“I wasn’t on duty when we hit,” the man said. “I was sleeping, in my bunk, waiting for my shift. I was in my bunk when I heard this terrible scraping noise, as if a giant finger ran along the side of the hull, so’s I went to investigate. Found my supervisor, who told me we’d hit ice. I realised the situation wasn’t serious – the ship’s designed to survive a collision, see. The water-tight doors are thick, impenetrable steel. I’ve worked on a few ships in me time, and I’ve never seen nothing like what this ship offers. It’s safe.”
If it were safe, why was he in the lifeboat? If it were safe, why wasn’t the story safe for a woman’s ears?
“That doesn’t make sense,” whispered Eleonora. “You said the story was horrifying.”
The Titanic had quietened now. Eliana realised that she didn’t know what direction it was in; she could not see, nor hear, it. It could have slipped beneath the ocean, and we would not even know it, she thought to herself, goose pimples ravaging her skin at the mere notion. Those that could swim, if they’d perchance been left behind, simply would. It was why men were the last to board, Eliana surmised; they were stronger, able to swim longer distances.
“Because after I returned to my bunk, I was summoned to attention. Water, we were told, was flowing down a staircase, lower down on F Deck.”
“So?” Eliana asked, annoyed. “Water flows down. That’s what water does.”
“Not on a ship it don’t,” the stoker replied. He didn’t seem perturbed by Eliana’s sharp tone. Somehow, the stoker’s lazy tone irritated Eliana further, and she found herself with a feral desire to strike the man. “When water above the sea line is flowing down a staircase, ma’am, you’ve got a serious problem.”
Eliana was glad this man was a simple stoker and not an engineer. He wouldn’t have passed the first lesson of how water flows.
Screams – louder than ever before – started filling the air. Screams that tore through the night like a hot knife through butter, piercing every passenger’s soul. Eliana fought the urge to cover her ears with her hands, blocking out the frightful sound. What is that?
“That’s the problem you have,” the man whispered, his voice hollow. “The ship sinks. The dead fill the air.”
“The ship didn’t sink!” wailed Eliana’s mother, and while she could barely see everyone’s face within the lifeboat, she could tell her mother had thrown her head around, glancing in the direction where the ship once was.
Had it sunk? Was the stoker right?
“I think it did,” whispered someone; she sounded French. Perhaps the French singer, she thought to herself. She’d recognised her, even though she could not have placed a name to her face. “Dieu repose leur âmes.”
“But we’d have heard it,” whispered Eliana. They’d heard crashing, to be sure, and the ship had sounded like it’d been ripped in two. But for the last two or three minutes, while the young stoker had talked, it had been almost quiet.
And now there’s screams of the dying.
While the collective grasped Eliana, occasionally she could hear the voices of individuals pleading for mercy, for God to save their souls, for anyone to save their souls. It sounded to Eliana like thousands, though she knew it couldn’t be. It’d only be a few men that hadn’t made it – probably steerage passengers, who had been lazy, not heeding the crew’s warnings, refusing to leave their cabins.
There weren’t any people of worth in the waters, of that Eliana was relatively certain. Maybe a few crew members had gone down with the ship, like the Captain, but that was what the Captain did. It was expected of him.
If the ship has indeed sunk, Eliana thought to herself. She wasn’t sure why she was so willing to believe him.
Perhaps because the screams are different now. Perhaps because you can hear the splashing. Perhaps it’s because you can hear them begging to be saved.
“What do we do?” someone whispered, and no one answered.
Eliana wondered if it was because there was nothing to do. Nothing but to sit and wait, listening to their terrified, tortured screams of those waiting to die. She wondered how many knew already death was coming for them but denied it. She wondered if some believed God would come down from the very heavens himself and pluck them out of the icy water.
And she wondered if the steerage passengers had regretted their lazy behaviour that was now resulting in their deaths, while she wondered if it made her a bad person to think of the fact that these people unwittingly went to their deaths simply because they could not be bothered heading toward the lifeboats.
Eliana hugged her mother tightly, who had begun to sob quietly again, and tried to think of reuniting with George. Instead of being haunted by the screams, she would focus on how she would apologise to George.
He was what mattered now.
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Monday, April 15th, 1912
Cecilia
Cecilia looked at the small Japanese man in the boat beside her. She had never seen a Japanese person before, even though she knew the Brits had supported the Japs in the Russo-Jap War a few years earlier. Until now, she hadn’t known there was even an Asian person on board the Titanic.
She also knew this was the time of ludicrous, classless, daft thoughts that Eliana would share, usually to highlight her superiority.
The thought of Eliana caused Cecilia to reflect on Georgiana, wondering if she had managed to make her way onto a boat. Try as she might, she could not shake her sister’s face as she’d almost plunged to her death when the ship suddenly listed.
Now, she was watching in horror as a wave washed over the Titanic, and a second wave threatened to capsize her lifeboat when the third tunnel collapsed. They were closer than most boats, and if Cecilia had better vision, she might have been able to pick out individual faces on the Boat Deck.
Fear clutched at Cecilia’s chest; she had seen another lifeboat being lowered as the passengers in her boat had rowed away from the sinking ship. Perhaps there’d been more on the starboard side; she didn’t know.
Of course Georgiana is on one of those lifeboats, she told herself. Georgie wouldn’t abandon her, wouldn’t leave her. Georgie knew how much Cecilia loved her sister; Cecilia couldn’t survive without her older sister. Cecilia reminded herself to think of Henry, who might not find a seat, who would perish if the ship sank, but she found her fear lay with her sister. Losing Henry was something she could fathom, though she was sure and certain her heart would break; losing Georgie was something she could not bring herself to imagine.
Cecilia’s breath caught in the chest – she was breathing steam into the air, the night was so cold; it did not help that she was underdressed, wrapped in a dressing gown and without a life vest, she couldn’t stop shivering. Someone had shared a red White Star L
ine blanket with her, for which she’d thanked them repeatedly. Each breath she took felt like fire in her chest, as if something was spreading through her lungs, burning them.
The lights on the Titanic flickered once, then twice, and then the boat was plunged into darkness. Screams and howls emerged promptly, as if those left on board were witnessing some great horror that, even as close as Cecilia’s lifeboat was, could not see. Terror struck her body as she tried not to think of Henry, William, her father, and George.
And most of all, Georgiana, who had waited for her.
“It sounds as if it’s being ripped apart,” someone murmured. Cecilia agreed; the ship made a god-awful sound, and she imagined all the fine chairs and tables crashing against the dining saloon walls, the shattering of the glass-pane windows, the water that would have slowly crept towards everyone, until it took them as its victim.
Cecilia wondered if anyone she knew was currently being hit by the furniture being thrown from the ship; but then, for just a moment, there was a silence, as if God had come down from the heavens and said, “Enough”.
The silence didn’t last much longer than a minute; this time, a hoard of angry, frightened screams filled the night sky. Cecilia was close enough to some of the victims to hear their individual cries of “Please! Oh, God, help us!” and “Have mercy on our souls!”
Cecilia wondered if one of the people screaming were Georgiana.
Or Henry.
Or William.
Or her father.
Or George.
“We – we should try and help,” whispered Cecilia, closing her blue eyes. They were burning from the salt spray as waves kept hitting the wooden vessel.
“Don’t be daft,” someone snapped. “We’re barely floating as it is. We can’t take more on.”
Cecilia thought this was a ridiculous comparison, as their boat only held around forty people. By and sure it was reasonably full, but they had spaces easily for a dozen more. If people sacrificed comfort, they could fit in at least twenty.
“The girl’s right,” one of the crewmen replied. “We’re close enough to go back.”
“They’ll swamp us,” someone else argued. “If we go back, they’ll take us, too.”
“We can’t not do anything,” Cecilia protested, her voice weak.
“Hands?” cried one of the crewmen. Cecilia knew there wasn’t more than three in the boat, and she wasn’t sure who among the crew was in charge. She wasn’t even sure the men casting the vote knew who was in charge.
Barely anyone raised their hand; most of the passengers stared at the floor. The Japanese man, who’d caused a flurry of anger when he’d lept from the Boat Deck into the lifeboat, was also silent. However, Cecilia supposed that it was because some of the men had threatened to throw him out of the boat. Cecilia didn’t understand the open hostility of the passengers towards him. He seemed kind enough when he’d introduced himself, and Cecilia could not blame him from seeking a chance to jump from a sinking ship into a safe vessel. Cecilia found that brave, not craven, even if he’d hurt her arm when he’d made the leap. She imagined it would still be aching now if it wasn’t frozen numb by the cold.
Cecilia did not have the energy to argue; her head was pounding, as the screams roared through her head. Every woman she heard was Georgiana; every man was her Henry, or William, who was like a brother, or her father, or George, who was kind, even if he was a bit dull.
Every scream ripped through her, setting every fibre of her body on fire, like a thousand pins stabbing her.
When the screaming finally abated, Cecilia could not help but think she would rather die a thousand times again than listen to the screaming inferno of hell, incapable to do anything about it.
Chapter Seventy
Monday, April 15th, 1912
Eliana
The night sky was filled with the buzzing of locusts, a loud, angry, horde of locusts. The screams seemed never to stop, and Eliana found herself pulling at her hair and ears, frantic for the screaming to stop. It had been going on for what seemed hours, but it had been scarcely forty minutes. When she’d last checked her watch, it had been almost three; the screams were less now, more singular. Part of Eliana couldn’t help but feel thankful – after all, the sea seemed littered with them; yet, at the same time, the quieter the night fell, the more uneasy she felt.
Nothing seemed right about the night. She hadn’t thought the ship would sink, though the stoker had been right. It had; it’d just disappeared into the night almost silently, as if ashamed she were such a bitter disappointment, abandoning her passengers in the middle of the ocean, incapable of completing her maiden voyage. As if the ship herself knew what would become of her and her survivors, the stories they told, and she didn’t want to grant them anything further than what she had.
Anyone left on board must’ve been terrified, Eliana realised. Even steerage people deserved a chance to flee, even if their ignorance was the cause of their demise. She wondered why so many had not sought the opportunity to hurry up to the Boat Deck, the way Eliana and her family had been ushered.
“I wonder if my husband is among them,” a woman whispered, and Eliana was surprised to discover her tone was light. She did not seem emotional about what had occurred, and she seemed capable of blocking the cries of the victims in the night. It was if she were attending a dinner party where a guest was misbehaving, not witnessing the sinking of the world’s greatest liner.
“You surely cannot believe he would be, with all the lifeboats?” Eliana asked, aghast. Her mother still hadn’t spoken but had begun to weep louder since the girl’s comment.
“Betty, please don’t,” whispered someone – a friend, or sister, perhaps – to the woman.
“You’re a fool, then,” the woman responded, her tone brisk. “That ship sunk, and it didn’t have enough lifeboats. I’d say we’d be lucky if there were enough boats to fit half. There’s plenty of our men out there.” She spoke as if she were talking about the weather, but Eliana felt as if the woman had slapped her across the face. For good measure, as if the sea wanted to remind them it was a hungry beast that hadn’t been satiated, the lifeboat hit a large swell, and the sea’s icy water whipped against her bare skin. Their boat was currently surrounded by an ice field, and no one had wished to try and row, terrified of what might happen.
After all, if ice could sink the Titanic, it would be able to destroy a small wooden raft without much effort.
“Honey, if your husband was on that ship, I ain’t got good news for you,” the woman replied, lighting a cigarette she pulled from her purse. “I was in the Smoking Room when the ship hit the berg –”
“But you’re a woman.”
“Really? I hadn’t noticed.” The woman sounded bored now, and Eliana wished she hadn’t spoken. The woman’s story tore through her more than the silence did.
“I didn’t mean –”
“Yes, you did,” the woman interrupted. “But frankly, I don’t give a damn. Name’s Betty. Betty Cameron.”
Eliana wasn’t sure what to say, so she simply gave her name, “Lady Eliana”, to which the woman laughed harshly.
“Well, Lady Eliana, you have a man on that ship? You just listened to him die.” The woman’s face occasionally lit up when she breathed in, before disappearing again in a puff of smoke.
“No, I didn’t,” Eliana replied. There had been plenty of lifeboats; George and her father would’ve found a seat, long after Georgiana and Cecilia had found theirs. Eliana and her mother had left the ship early, at one-fifteen. The Scottish officer had lowered them – into boat thirteen, she thought, though how on earth could she be expected to remember or know such a thing? – but it was one of the first boats. “George and Papa would have found seats. William, too,” she added, as an afterthought.
“No, they likely didn’t,” the woman responded, and Eliana wondered why everyone in the boat was so quiet. Earlier, the stoker had been opinionated – why wasn’t he telling this woman to shut
up now? He’d saved them, after all, when the other boat had almost landed on them, crushing them. “Like I said, I was in the Smoking Room when we hit. I was with Gracie and some others. Great fun, it was. Except I’m also friends with Bruce Ismay. He’s a quiet fella, but when I saw him on deck, helping passengers? I knew something was up. With men like Brucey, you learn how to read them because they say so bloody little. Bruce Ismay loves his ships, and his passengers. As soon as I saw him helping women into lifeboats, trying to encourage them to leave the ship, I asked him outright if she were sinking.”
There was a deafening silence, and Eliana could tell the entire lifeboat was focused on the mysterious woman’s story. Eliana wasn’t sure whether it was her vulgarity and crudeness that caught their focus, or the way she spoke as if she knew something they didn’t. The locusts started humming more, like bees; as if the cries, screams and wails were slowly dissipating across the night sky. Part of her felt relief; the rest of her hated her for it.
She tried not to imagine George, or her father, or William, in the ocean.
Eliana reminded herself that a woman who frequented a man’s room was not one that could be trusted upon in any reliable fashion.
“What does that have to do with anything?” Eliana cried, frustrated no one was confronting the woman. Everyone seemed to have lost their tongues. “Of course my husband got into a lifeboat! He just had to wait his turn!”
“Maybe you should stop,” one of the crewmen said. He was dressed in white linens, like the saloon stewards. Why should he tell her to stop as if I’m a child? Why does he say it like that? As if he’s afraid she’s going to reveal some horrific secret?
“She’s going to find out sooner or later,” the woman scoffed. “There weren’t enough lifeboats.”
Dread spread through Eliana’s chest for the first time. She tried to think of the times she’d walked the Boat Deck – it hadn’t been many; she’d stayed mostly confined to her room, citing motion sickness, but she was pregnant – Oh, God, she was pregnant, and where was George? A tightness washed over her, and she buckled forward, unable to catch her breath. “No, no, no,” she whispered. “That’s not true. Of course there were enough lifeboats.” But she didn’t believe herself; her words sounded hollow, even to her. They must’ve sounded hollow to everyone else as well, because even the horrible woman didn’t twist the knife further. George.
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