“It is just fact, Mr. Morgan. And it is my role to warn you of it as directly as possible, not to describe to you how it will happen.”
Morgan thought for a long moment. “If I do not sail on this voyage, I will never know what might have befallen me.”
“You will know,” she said emphatically. “You will know and you will be grateful for the warning.”
“And—”
“When you know,” she said, “you must promise me that before the voyage and then after it you will hold this information in the greatest confidence. If you discover that what I say is true, then you will tell no one.” She paused. “Ever.”
“If I do not sail with the ship and if nothing manifests itself, what then?”
She said nothing for a moment, her eyes not moving from his. “If nothing manifests itself, then you may do with me and my information as you will.” She paused, considering her words, her eyes still not faltering.
“You are a startlingly convincing woman, Mrs. Burden.” The powerful man was accustomed to using unsettling candor to his advantage.
Eleanor did not flinch. She stood her ground, and her response was near instantaneous. “My purpose here is to be convincing, Mr. Morgan.”
“After the forthcoming voyage we will perhaps meet again.”
“Perhaps,” she said, releasing him from her gaze. “But if what I say manifests itself, as you say, then there will be absolutely no follow-up to this conversation. Can I be assured of that?” Mr. Morgan did not budge, which Eleanor interpreted as permission to proceed.
She softened. “You will see that I come to you at great risk,” she said, “and with confidence—well founded I hope—that none of this will leave this room. You must promise me that you will keep my secret.”
J. P. Morgan gave another harrumph and only the slightest nod that might have been construed as the sole affirmation Eleanor was going to get. With a kind of suddenness, the door through which she had entered opened, and the assistant with the mole appeared and stood formally while Mr. Morgan finished. “And now, Mr. Prescott will see to your needs.” The great whale of a man stepped forward and shook Eleanor’s hand, and he turned and left.
The assistant showed her to the reception area. “That is longer than most people get,” he said, still solicitous, aware of the unusual nature of her appearance without an appointment. “Under the circumstances.” She thanked him for his kindness and left the Morgan office. It was not until she was out on the street hailing a cab that she realized she was shaking and felt positively ill.
When she arrived at Grand Central Station and sat in the cavernous waiting room, she began to unwind from the tensions of what had just transpired. She had prepared for the meeting with mental exercises so as to remain unruffled and assertive in the presence of the most powerful man in the world, and that had gone as well as could be expected. She had known of his reputation of withering his opposition in the personal meetings, and she had stood firm well enough to deliver a message without appearing either weak or vacillating or, for that matter, strident or presumptuous. Now, sitting alone in the vast station waiting room, she found herself able to evaluate her own performance from what she was now able to recall in the blur of her memory, and she deduced that she had probably managed to appear calm, and she had said the rehearsed words without stuttering or stammering or showing any obvious signs of being well beyond her point of social ease. She had done her job.
And then as she sat alone in that vast space, the old thought came back to haunt her. Why, if she could warn Mr. Morgan—as prescribed by the Vienna journal—should she not issue the specifics of the warning and tell him of an awful tragedy that was about to happen, if it was about to happen? Why warn only Mr. Morgan? she asked herself. Why not warn everyone? And then there was the old thought that came as just a hint in this moment but had waited there in the background over the years: What a relief it would be if nothing happened and she could be freed from the journal and its obligations. Now, as with other visits from such troubling thoughts, she told herself first that she had no choice in the matter and second that nothing was assured to happen. Those two thoughts comforted her now, as they had in the past and would in the future. They were, as her friend Carl Jung would say many times, pure denial.
Finally, by the time she rose and headed for her train back to Boston, she had convinced herself that she had carried out the Herculean task with as much grace as was within her abilities, and perhaps well enough to be convincing. Whether J. P. Morgan would heed her admonition and avoid sailing on his great ship’s maiden voyage she might never know.
On the train ride back to Boston, she continued going over and over what had just transpired with her meeting until she had exhausted every strand of possibility and explored every memory until she fell asleep, again watching the Connecticut countryside roll by. By the time she arrived back in Boston, her disposition had returned to near normal.
“And what of your meeting with Mr. Morgan?” Will Honeycutt asked her the next morning in their office.
“Most satisfactory,” she said. “And auspicious.”
23
THE UNSPEAKABLE AVERTED
As the maiden voyage of the great ship approached, its scale and magnificence had pushed its way into the foreground of all world news. The whole world seemed to be aware that on April 10, the Titanic, the largest, most elaborately appointed ship in the world, was to sail from England on its way to New York. And not everyone thought it a positive accomplishment for civilization. “Shameful opulence,” Frank Burden, ever the conservative Boston banker, had announced over breakfast one morning in May as he read in the Boston Herald the details of the approaching voyage date. “This kind of display of wealth is unseemly. It is the curse of our age,” he added.
But still, the world watched with fascination and not a small portion of awe. “People enjoy watching the extravagantly wealthy throw around their money,” Will Honeycutt reported Jesse Livermore as saying. “It’s like female peacocks in the thrall of elegant plumage.”
From its earliest days of construction in the dry docks of Harland and Wolff in Belfast, Eleanor had had trouble getting the ship’s progress out of her mind. How, she kept running around in her head, could the biggest, grandest, safest, most expensive monstrosity, this perfect symbol of the opulence of the age, this great triumph of industrial imagination and engineering brilliance, sink? The thought was so astounding as to cause her once again to doubt the veracity of the journal. Up until this point in 1912, the predictions in the journal had been correct, even those that began as improbable, and she had the grandiose success of the Hyperion Fund to prove its accuracy. But now this one seemed absolutely preposterous, as Will Honeycutt kept insisting it was highly improbable that such a magnificent ship could sink.
She found herself wishing then that at least parts of the predicted future from the journal had been inaccurately recorded and would definitely not be coming to pass, that history would unfold this time in a different way, take a different path, that the ship would not sink, that the two horrible world conflagrations would not come about, even that her son and grandson would not be involved, even if that meant the future described in the journal to be inaccurate. Yes, she thought, wishing that the whole cursed deal of the Vienna journal was off and she could assume the simple life of status quo in Frank Burden’s world of Boston as it had always been and ever shall be.
She kept an eye on the ship’s progress without sharing her dread with anyone. She knew of its moment of departure and charted its course across the North Atlantic. In the middle of the first day, she telephoned the Boston Globe and asked if there was by chance any unusual news from the White Star Line’s prized Titanic; there was nothing unusual the first day, or the second, or the third, fourth, or fifth. Without wishing to attract attention, she said simply that she always felt nervous about big events. The young reporter on the other end of the line told her to relax, that they were talking about the safest ship tha
t had ever set sail.
Then on the morning of April 15, the sixth day after departure, rumors began. During the previous night, ships well beyond the two-hundred-fifty-mile normal transmission range of the new Marconi radios had heard an unmistakable call of distress from the luxury ship Titanic. The great ship’s radio, it was boasted, had a three-hundred-fifty-mile range in daytime and a range of one thousand miles at night. “CQD,” the message said, which was the international maritime code for the ultimate distress, “MGY,” the code for the mighty ship, and “41.46 N, 50.14 W. HAVE STRUCK A BERG. COME QUICK.”
Eleanor learned it in her morning call to the Boston Globe. “We have heard no more,” the reporter said. “Call back in a few hours.”
“What about rescue ships?” Eleanor asked.
“It seems that there are some in the area,” the reporter said. “We still know nothing of them. Call back in a few hours.”
Eleanor remembered Will Honeycutt’s description of the White Star ship Republic, struck by another ship, and sinking; it had taken long hours, but all passengers had been transferred to rescue ships and a coast guard vessel called to the site by a heroic Marconi operator.
When she called back an hour later, the details were available. The Titanic had struck an iceberg in the night. An iceberg! she thought; of all the scenarios, that was a possibility Will Honeycutt had presented to her only in passing. This was the glancing blow in freezing water. At first, no one could believe that the huge ship would actually sink. “News is that the Titanic is still afloat and that all lives are saved,” the reporter said. “It seems that the unspeakable has been averted.”
Frank Burden would be following the news from the bank, she knew, as the damage to such a shamefully opulent ship of the line would involve significant financial impact. “No reliable details as of yet,” he said when she telephoned him in his office. “Grim rumors persist. There is a report that the vessel remains afloat, and all passengers have been transferred safely to another ship, like the Republic. The Titanic will be towed into Halifax, the nearest landfall. But the Republic was struck only fifty miles from New York Harbor. This accident is in the middle of the North Atlantic.”
At noon, Eleanor arranged a motorcar to take her to the auxiliary meeting at the Museum of Fine Arts. The disaster was all the ladies wished to talk about. In old Boston society, there was almost no one who did not know or know of someone who had chosen to sail on the maiden voyage of the opulent new ship. And, hence, in the wake of such horrendous news, there was no one who was not personally attentive to the bits of news and rumor that had been drifting in all morning.
“So often in these situations,” said one matron, “everything turns out just fine.”
“It is the miracle of wireless radio,” said another. “It has meant that rescue ships could be on almost any scene in no time.” Everyone in the world who had heard of the distress call and the foundering took solace in the hope that in a matter of hours all passengers would be transferred to other vessels.
“But I’ve heard that suddenly all went to silence,” said another.
“Yes, I’ve heard something more dire. That the great ship has sunk and some passengers had found safety on an iceberg before being rescued.”
At this point Eleanor added what she had heard from Will Honeycutt earlier in the day, that she feared that no news was not good news. “If there were anything good to report,” Will had said, “they would be telling us.” And most of the ladies agreed.
“I hear there were lots of famous people on board, and they have gone down with the ship.”
“Yes, Astor, Guggenheim, and J. P. Morgan.”
“J. P. Morgan?” Eleanor said with a gasp.
“Yes, he owns the ship, and he was on board.”
“Are you sure?” Eleanor asked.
“Yes. I’m certain. My husband knows the Morgans, and he told me directly.”
Eleanor steadied herself and gave no sign that anything was amiss but said nothing for the rest of the meeting, as more and more details were speculated on, most of them without foundation. On the ride back to Beacon Hill, she felt ill.
Then, at the end of the day, after the girls came home from school, filled with wild stories, Frank Burden called to say that the fully awful news was confirmed. “The whole story is in,” he said with characteristic finality. “The Titanic has sunk, and there weren’t enough lifeboats. Only a few hundred of the passengers, mostly women and children, have been saved.”
Eleanor felt stabbed in the heart. “And what of J. P. Morgan?” she asked her serious husband.
“And what of him?”
“Was he on board?”
“I have not heard of that,” he said. And then he added condescendingly, “Not every famous financier was on board, you know.”
Once again, and this time in horrendous proportions, the power of the journal was confirmed, once and for all. She could tell no one. If the world had known of her foreknowledge, she would have been a pariah. Living through Will Honeycutt’s suspicions was bad enough. He came to her ashen-faced shortly after he heard the news. “You knew,” he said, obviously disturbed. She should have deflected the remark with some quick retort, but this time she said nothing and looked away.
He followed with, “How did you know?” and then, realizing he would receive no answer, he said, “The iceberg. I keep thinking of the iceberg and the article I wrote.” He was staring again. “You suggested it.”
“I did not,” she said quickly. “Not the iceberg.”
“But you did, with your hypothetical questions. Only it wasn’t hypothetical, was it?”
“I only wondered,” she said. “I only asked—”
He interrupted her. “It was impossible. The ship was unsinkable.” Then he paused, thinking. “It is hard to take it all in, the size of it all, the numbers, the scale. You warned J. P. Morgan, didn’t you? That was the purpose of your meeting.”
Eleanor said nothing, only offering the slightest nod. And her young colleague looked shaken. She could see in his eyes a wildness that suggested more than just eccentricity.
Suddenly, he said, “Did you cause it?”
The question was so bizarre that even coming from Will Honeycutt it stopped her in her tracks. “No, I did not cause it,” she said as if answering the most mundane question. “I simply knew it was going to happen.”
Will looked for a moment, then said, “Oh,” as if it were likewise the most mundane answer. “And you, I suppose, will not tell me what oracle you consult.”
“Intuition, Mr. Honeycutt,” she said quickly, but this time there was a flat defensiveness in her voice, and she made it clear with her eyes that she was not going to reveal more.
He stared at her hard for a moment, then began, “One would think that after all this time we would trust each other.” Then he stopped, shook his head, and turned toward the office door, clearly exasperated by her unwillingness to share her secrets and eager to leave. And she thought in that moment that a great mythic event of enormous magnitude had happened in their world, and everyone would respond differently, but no one she knew would avoid being shaken to the core. No one, that is, except Frank Burden.
In the morning at breakfast, Frank did not notice her dark mood and continued on his tack of “shameful opulence.” He had felt for a long time that the excesses of the new century were unhealthy and would lead to no good. “The end of this ridiculous trend,” he said while breaking open the top of his hard-boiled egg with a spoon. “It is time that everyone learned a lesson. The builders of such a monstrosity had it coming,” he added with cold dispatch. He continued without noticing the look on his wife’s face for the remainder of the breakfast.
And it did not help matters that Will Honeycutt, ever the scientist, kept mulling over and over the details. It had been the worst of her Cassandra dilemma, knowing the future but, by the very nature of her fate, being powerless to do anything about it. The sheer size of what was to happen with the Titanic
—that such a monumental ship was to sink in mid-voyage—made it unthinkable, impossible to believe.
“What they ran into out there was bigger than the ship itself,” he said that first day, when everyone was still adjusting to the enormity of what had happened, “much bigger, and you know, only one-ninth of an iceberg rises above the surface. Eight-ninths below the surface, down into the icy inky black.” He stopped, his mind working. “Then there is the depth. The ocean at that point is two miles deep. It is my figuring that it took that great ship something like ten minutes to fall to the bottom.” He made a sinking gesture with his hand. “Imagine being trapped inside the hull, as many were, I’m sure, sinking to the bottom—”
“Please,” she burst out finally, stopping him. “I have to sit down.” The observation made her swoon and left her with a feeling of great emptiness.
He stared wildly, not noticing or caring about her dismay. “How did you know?” he repeated, this time with complete scientific detachment.
As reports came in over the next few days, it became obvious that J. P. Morgan had not been on board. In the years that followed, no reason for his not sailing leaked out. The great banker had simply changed his plans and not sailed on his opulent ship’s maiden voyage. Obviously, Mr. Morgan would have realized immediately and completely the full import of Eleanor’s warning to him, or perhaps, although not likely, the whole incident had slipped from his mind in the confrontation of such enormous loss. He died a year later in Rome, of natural causes, apparently intending to keep secret forever his reason for making the fateful change. As agreed, Eleanor Burden had not heard from him again.
She read about his death in the Boston Globe on April 1, 1913, a year almost to the day after the Titanic tragedy. A few weeks later, she received in the mail an envelope posted from Italy, with no return address. Inside, on a sheet of stationery headed by the name John Pierpont Morgan, was a handwritten note and an illegible scrawl of a signature that looked, she discovered after some investigation, very much like Morgan’s. “If ever you should need a return favor,” the letter read, “contact my son, Jack. He knows of your intervention on my behalf.”
The Lost Prince Page 17