Eleanor

by RA Williams

  It was a headlamp attached to the motor car. Gasping for air at last, she managed to take one salty breath before another surge sucked her back into the maelstrom. She knew if she inhaled again her lungs would fill and she would drown. Tumbling, she crashed into a bulkhead. Her lungs almost burst as she gasped, seawater invading them. Panicked, she regurgitated the water. Instinctively inhaling again, she prayed for air.

  More water filled her lungs.

  Then something grasped the collar of her coat, twisting her against the current. Reaching out in desperation, she felt an arm bend at the elbow, drawing her close. Grasping to take hold, her hand fumbled across heavy, soaked clothing. She felt a fine chain slip through her freezing fingers, until a small, flat object came to rest in her palm, coming away just as her hand closed tightly about it. Her head became heavy as her body went limp with exhaustion, and she blacked out.

  Brief moments of consciousness. She felt herself ascending, hauled by strong arms. Then she choked, vomiting oily seawater. She tried to raise her hands to wipe away the stinging in her eyes, but her sodden coat felt like sacks of cement on her exhausted limbs. Blinking, Elle realised she was being carried up the escape ladder, away from the flooding.

  Sapped in both mind and body, she was only vaguely aware of stairs and companionways until she was set down in a brightly lit, mercifully dry corridor. Scotland Road. Balthasar stared down at her.

  ‘You’ve a long, dark road ahead, Eleanor,’ he said.

  Then he was gone. And so was she.

  ‘Oi.’

  Elle drifted back to consciousness. A crew of stokers stood above her, faces soot-covered from shovelling coal into the ship’s boilers.

  ‘Wot the hell are you doing here?’

  Shivering and confused, she pleaded for their help.

  A wavy-haired young man wearing a lifebelt over his uniform approached her then. It was not a White Star uniform.

  ‘If I were you, I would turn out, you fellows,’ he said as he pushed by. ‘The ship is making water.’

  ‘What? Planning on going down with the ship in your uniform, Frog?’ a member of the ship’s black gang said dismissively.

  ‘Viswijf, Ik heb echt geen zin om mijn uniform, noch mijn nationale trots met u te bespreken,’ the young officer replied. Even a semi-conscious Elle recognised the word viswijf. She’d been chased about London by enough Belgian men to know it was a derogatory Flemish term for a woman. When directed at another man, it normally preceded a fight. The soldier must be Belgian.

  Pushing towards her, he grasped Elle by her coat lapels.

  ‘You have the look of the vagabond, mijn schatje. I am Lieutenant Jean-René Gaele. With your permission or without, I must carry you for the moment.’

  As she was heaved over his shoulder, her hand relaxed, and the chain she gripped in her cold fingers bounced along the planked floor.

  A stoker lifted it, tucking it into a pocket of her wet coat. ‘Don’t forget your locket, luv.’

  The next minutes were a blur. More stairs. More companionways. The stokers’ endless profanity hammered the tin of proper English. The Belgian remained silent, the smell of sweat and Gauloises cigarettes his only contribution to the conversation.

  ‘I will leave you now,’ he said after a while, gently settling her in a deckchair on the Boat Deck before wrapping her in a steamer rug. ‘I have my superiors to look after. Someone will be along to put you into a lifeboat. Good luck, mijn schatje.’

  She lay there for what seemed ages, her mind reeling from the horror of what she had witnessed below deck. A whip of bracing Atlantic air caused some give in the rigging above. Glittering ice shavings danced around a deck light, drawing her tired gaze. She thought of Mother, practising her out-of-tune violin in the conservatory of their home in Detroit.

  The blanket over her was pulled back.

  ‘Eleanor?’

  Her father stood above her, lifebelt tied about his immaculate dinner suit, a worried expression on his face. Mother stood beside him, a cross look on hers.

  ‘Where have you been, child?’ Father asked, removing the steamer rug to stand her up.

  ‘Shivers,’ said Mother, ‘you’re soaking wet!’

  Unscrewing a sterling silver flask, Ribs Wimbourne passed it to her father. ‘Give the wet hedgehog a nip.’

  She pressed it to her lips, gulping from the flask, cognac warming her.

  Before anyone had the chance to question her, a shudder caused the ship to list to starboard, the slant in the deck growing steeper as Titanic sank further at the head.

  Women shrieked, their former quiet concern replaced by panic. An order called women and children to A-Deck to be put off in the lifeboats.

  Second Officer Lightoller approached. ‘Are you all right, Miss Annenberg?’ Elle nodded, teeth rattling. ‘Mr Annenberg, won’t you take your wife and daughter down to A-Deck and put them in a lifeboat?’

  ‘Why must we go down there?’ Mother demanded to know. ‘Can we not load in from up here?’

  ‘Not any longer. Titanic’s list has grown too great.’

  Another rocket exploded in the air, revealing the second officer’s concern. Looking along the deck to the passengers descending to A-Deck, he continued. ‘The crew has lowered the windows on the enclosed promenade. If you would take your wife and daughter down now, I promise they’ll have a place in a boat.’

  Elle’s father turned to the commander. ‘Getting to be rather a tight corner, Ribs.’

  ‘Best put the ladies off, just in case.’

  Taking Mother by the hand, Elle’s father asked Ribs to carry Elle down to A-Deck. She was in no condition to protest. As she was carried down the stairs, Elle saw the deckchair where she and Titch had sat an hour ago. It was empty. The sea was now rolling well over the sides of the ship and onto the decks.

  Father turned to Elle, kissing her forehead. ‘Keep an eye on your mother. She does put on a brave face, but she’s not as strong as you.’

  Panic-stricken, Mother turned to him. ‘Franklyn, you aren’t coming?’

  ‘Ribs and I will get in a boat after the ladies and children are safely away.’

  Seawater crept up the deck towards them. Titanic groaned under the weight of the flooding.

  ‘I won’t go,’ said Elle’s mother.

  For once, Elle agreed with her mother. ‘Not without you, Father.’

  An irritated seaman grasped her by the arm, frogmarching her across the deck to a lifeboat. Mother followed, with a bit of nudging. Elle struggled. She knew she had to leave the ship, but not without her father.

  ‘I’ve had enough of you annoying birds tonight,’ said the seaman as he lifted her up to pass her through a window frame. A lifeboat swung just below.

  ‘No!’ Elle resisted. Squirming in the seaman’s arms, she kicked her legs. Holding one of Mother’s arms, Ribs took one of Elle’s motoring boots to the chin. Dropping her mother’s arm, he teetered at an open window before toppling over the side and into the waiting lifeboat below.

  ‘That’s enough of that,’ said the able-bodied seaman, picking Elle up and pushing her through the window.

  She plummeted head first into the lifeboat, clobbering old Lady Cunard, sitting squirrel-like in the stern.

  ‘Mind yourself, you impertinent brat,’ she snipped, all pinch-faced and superior. Elle’s mother followed close behind, landing on both of them. Before Elle could untangle herself, Lifeboat 4 lowered away.

  ‘How about putting a few more in that bloody boat?’ a trimmer on deck shouted to Lightoller.

  Dazed, Elle shifted Mother to the side, gazing around the half-empty lifeboat. A seaman at the tackles lowered the boat in jolting lunges. Ribs sat on the bow gunwale, giving Elle the evils and holding a handkerchief to his bleeding mouth. The trimmer who’d shouted at Lightoller slid down the fall from A-Deck, landing in the lifeboat beside her, stinking of brandy. Her father remained at the promenade window, staring down at them.

  ‘Father, climb down the rope,�
�� she pleaded.

  ‘Not to worry,’ he said with a reassuring wave. ‘I’ll climb in the next one—’

  A devilish hiss of steam from a funnel drowned out her father’s reply. The ship’s list to port increased, causing the lifeboat’s rubbing strake below the gunwale to snag on the hull rivets. Taking up oars from the bottom of the lifeboat, the seamen fended them from the side of the ship as seawater poured through the big square ports of C-Deck, sweeping around a stateroom’s furniture.

  The lifeboat landed in the water with a shudder. Ribs slid an oar into its lock.

  ‘Take up an oar,’ he yelled to a quartermaster shipping the rudder. ‘Lean hard into it or we’ll be drawn into Titanic’s suction.’ The quartermaster nodded, ordering his crewmen to do the same. Pulling an oar from under her feet, Elle’s shaking hands struggled to slide it into an oar lock.

  ‘What are you doing, Eleanor?’

  Dropping the blade into the water, Elle pulled back hard before replying to her mother, ‘Rowing.’

  Turning to Lady Cunard, she suggested she do the same lest they let the three available men in the lifeboat handle the oars alone.

  ‘Certainly not,’ Lady Cunard whinged. ‘A Lady does not do a man’s chore.’

  ‘Is drowning a man’s chore?’ asked Elle, splashing Her Ladyship’s fur wrap.

  The advancing sea crept past the ship’s bridge and over the windows of D-Deck. As Titanic’s stern swung lazily upwards, there came a strange sound, like breaking china.

  The trimmer beside Elle looked over his shoulder. ‘Cripes, them boiler plates is packin’ in.’

  ‘We must get clear,’ shouted the quartermaster. ‘Or else be sucked down with the ship.’

  ‘Row like galley slaves,’ Ribs ordered. More ladies took up oars. Reluctantly, so did Lady Cunard.

  A wave washed over the roof of the officers’ quarters. More agile passengers made their way aft, while those less fortunate were washed from the deck. A man in striped pyjamas went overboard with the wave. Swimming towards them, he was hauled in by Ribs. ‘Corker of a cannonball, old boy.’

  ‘If Your law had not been my delight, then I would have perished in my affliction,’ he muttered, teeth chattering as a lady wrapped her heavy fur coat about his soaking wet body.

  ‘Psalm 119. Verse 92,’ said Lady Cunard, between strokes.

  ‘Aye.’ He wore a clerical collar under his soaked pyjamas. Ribs offered his nip flask to the obliging vicar.

  ‘God gave me a boot up the behind, so he did.’

  He drained the flask. God must have smiled upon him. He was saved by one of the last lifeboats. There were hundreds, perhaps a thousand souls, who remained on deck.

  ❖❖❖

  Standing at the open window on the Promenade Deck, Franklyn Annenberg watched the sea churn towards him as Titanic continued to sink bow first. With all lifeboats gone, an odd calm fell over the ship. Removing his pocket watch, he looked at the time. The watch was a gift from Louise. She’d be ever so cross with him if it got wet.

  ‘Have you the time?’

  He turned. A man wearing a well-worn hacking jacket stood beside him, firing up a cigar.

  ‘Five minutes after two,’ Franklyn replied. The man reached into his jacket, retrieving a cigar case. A single cigar remained. He offered it to Franklyn.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t possibly accept your last cigar.’

  ‘Ah, go way outta that, of course you will – I’ll not need it.’ Sliding it from the leather case, Franklyn gave it a sniff. It wasn’t Cuban, but who was he to complain? The man held a flame. A few puffs, and a cloud of blue smoke arose above his head. Franklyn thanked him.

  ‘I was saving it until I got a peek at the Statue of Liberty.’

  From deep in the bowels of the ship, explosions shook the wood-planked deck. Titanic shifted violently under their feet.

  ‘Should’a stayed put in Cork.’

  The lights of the enclosed promenade, which had burned brightly until then, began glowing red as they dimmed.

  ‘New York is full of Irish,’ said Franklyn, face blanching as he realised the end was near. ‘You would think you were still home.’

  ‘American?’

  Franklyn nodded.

  The man offered his hand. ‘Corky O’Shea.’

  ‘Franklyn Annenberg.’ Shaking hands with the Irishman, he returned his gaze to the sea. ‘Like a millpond.’

  ‘Aw, sure look it. Twenty years I been at sea. I never seen it this flat calm.’

  ‘Not so much as a ripple,’ Franklyn replied, the biting night air chapping his face. ‘Can’t imagine how cold it must be.’ In the distance, he made out the green bow lamps of the lifeboats. ‘Suppose we’ll find out.’

  Corky nodded. ‘Got a missus in one of them boats?’

  ‘And a daughter.’ He felt tears welling up.

  ‘That’s something, then. Ain’t it?’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Me missus won’t go to America ’til I find work.’ The Irishman blew a smoke ring. It drifted away from the doomed ship. ‘Suppose she won’t see it neither, now it’s all gone arseways on us.’

  ‘Sailor?’ asked Franklyn, similarly blowing a smoke ring.

  ‘Aye. Mate on a fishing trawler.’

  Looking down the deck as the dark swirling water crept closer, Franklyn asked, ‘So you can swim?’

  The Irishman laughed. ‘Not a damn stroke.’

  A steward appeared on deck, a young man with a bushy moustache. He nodded in their direction, adjusting the lifebelt around his waist.

  ‘Best take our chances in the water. Titanic doesn’t have long left,’ he said, climbing over the windowsill. He hesitated, looking back at Franklyn. ‘God bless.’

  Leaping clear, he landed feet first in the water. Franklyn watched the steward surface, expelling a quavering yelp. The water must have been freezing. He began swimming frantically in the direction of the lifeboats, now more than a hundred yards away.

  Taking a last puff of his cigar, Franklyn tossed it overboard. It bounced off Titanic’s hull before snuffing out in the churning sea. ‘Shall we?’

  ‘Sure, I might,’ replied Corky, his cigar joining Franklyn’s. ‘I wish I’d known you.’

  ‘If you come through this, call on us in Detroit.’

  Franklyn had barely got a leg over the windowsill before he heard a peculiar whipping sound. Steel lines securing the forward funnel under tension began snapping one by one from the stress of Titanic going down at the head. The securing lines freed, they whipped across the deck, one slicing off the arm of a cabin steward with a surgeon’s precision. Knees buckling, he collapsed, the encroaching sea swallowing him up as Titanic’s forward funnel broke away. Tipping over, it crashed across the Boat Deck above in a cloud of smoke and sparks as it landed in the water, the massive funnel crushing swimmers.

  The steward popped up in the sea, his white jacket visible under the lifebelt that brought him to the surface. He continued to stroke one-handed amid the other human flotsam, left arm gone.

  Stoically untying his lifebelt, Franklyn tossed it to the sea, adjusting his velvet smoking jacket. It didn’t matter if he jumped or remained on deck. The end was now a fait accompli.

  At that moment, a collapsible Engelhardt lowered by. Stokers working the blocks desperately tried to iron out the flutter foots in the falls.

  ‘Mr O’Shea.’ A man stood in the bow looking at them. ‘It’s Cabin Steward Beedham here.’

  ‘Ahoy, Dougie,’ replied Corky, the deck pitching down as Titanic began its death dive. ‘You need nae make up my bunk in the morning.’

  Beedham grasped a fall, leaning towards them. ‘You two better jump in,’ he called, even though the flimsy boat was stowed out beyond the plimsoll.

  Franklyn looked to his new friend, feeling ungentlemanly about abandoning Titanic. ‘Why not?’

  Corky nodded.

  Tucking away his pocket watch, he obliged the steward as he reached out a hand.

  ‘I ho
pe I don’t miss. Louise will be cross if I get my watch wet.’ Climbing over the windowsill, he leaped from the ship, the fall secured to the Engelhardt’s bow, just out of reach.

  ❖❖❖

  Silhouetted against the starlit night, Titanic gave up the fight. Those not fortunate enough to find a lifeboat held on dearly to deckhouses, ventilators and winches as the downward angle of the deck increased. Explosions erupted below decks, the ship’s lights winking before going out forever. A clutch of passengers held one another atop the poop deck, wailing for mercy as the stern reared up high above the sea, only to fall to their deaths amid a maelstrom of spinning ropes and deckchairs. Somewhere among it was Elle’s father.

  And Balthasar.

  Groaning in its death throes, Titanic turned, the sea closing over the ship’s stern with a final gasp.

  ‘Those poor souls,’ Mother sobbed, clutching Elle in her arms. Elle felt numb. And not just due to the cruel night air chapping her exposed face.

  A peal of suffering arose from the frigid sea. Amid the mass of debris, survivors wailed in anguish, desperate to be saved.

  ‘Mustn’t we help them?’ a lady called out, voice strained from weeping.

  Looking to the bow, Elle made eye contact with Ribs. He nodded before turning to the quartermaster, demanding he turn the lifeboat back for the unfortunates in the water.

  ‘No, we shan’t,’ old Lady Cunard barked, all priggish and privileged. ‘They’ll swamp us. You’ll have all of us drowned.’

  ‘Turn about,’ Ribs ordered Quartermaster Perks, before turning on Her Ladyship. ‘And there will be room for one more in this blooming boat if you refuse the quartermaster.’

  ‘Turning us round,’ Perks confirmed, leaning against the tiller.

  Pulling hard on the oars, they reached the swimmers. Lifeboat 4 rocked as Ribs and the quartermaster hauled in anyone they could find alive.

  ‘Good God, man,’ Elle heard Ribs gasp, his brow furrowing as he pulled a fifth man from the water.