Chapter 18
I know you tried to hold on to him. Of course I know you did.
It’s going to sound strange, and maybe you won’t even believe it, but I also know exactly when it happened.
That Friday afternoon, I was in the conservatory with my violin, serenading a nest of baby birds in one of the pomegranate trees.
I was playing softly, because they were only hatchlings, still pink and blind.
I was lost in the music, listening to the forest notes, Mab’s notes, caught in her dream. But all at once, my eyes—
My heart—
It’s hard to describe.
All the light around me was doused in an instant, no warning, no quarter. The music was gone; the air was gone. I couldn’t breathe. My knees buckled and my heart just … stopped.
It lasted only seconds, but I had to sit down, I was so dizzy. I had to put down my violin.
I haven’t picked it up since.
FRIDAY, MAY 7, 1915
IN THE CELTIC SEA
The cold of it nearly caused her to inhale in shock, but Rita managed to keep her lips pressed closed as the water dragged her lower, her arms out, her hair dark tentacles around her face.
She was tumbling, flailing, her dress wrapped tightly around her legs, unable to kick, unable to right herself.
Tiny, brilliant bubbles surrounded her like a celebration, trapped air siphoning away from her clothes.
She spun and spun, caught in an eddy, and when it finally loosened, there were spots in her eyes.
The layers of her skirts unwound, releasing more bubbles. She kicked as hard as she could for the surface, her lungs afire, buoyed by the life jacket, aiming for the silvery green luminance shimmering above her.
She surfaced. Sucked in a huge breath, coughing as she inhaled saltwater as well, swinging up and down, back and forth, as the sky rocked above her head and the sunlight blinded her.
Screams bounced along the waves, the rushing thunder of the ship.
She tore her hair from her face, trying to see where she was, where the Lusitania was, was it near enough to hit her—but before she could take another breath, the suction stole her again, pulling her under, and everything went silent.
Just her heartbeat in her ears, a frantic drumming.
Just the gurgle and slosh of the deep water all around, smothering.
The sea faded to olive, to black. All the bubbles were gone.
Her eyes burned, her lungs burned. She kicked and kicked, desperate, fighting for her life to reach the surface again, but she was stories below it, fathoms below.
Her skirts billowed and thinned around her like a jellyfish, so much silk and organza, so much extra drag. Her corset bit into her torso.
I’m not going to die here, I’m not ready to die, I won’t die here, like this—
For some reason, for no reason, just luck or physics or chance, the eddy weakened. She fought her way upward again, Please, God, let me be going up, and when the light returned, there was a new shadow above her, almond-shaped. A lifeboat.
This time when she broke free, Rita took a deep, whooping breath. The lifeboat was overturned but still floating, so she sliced her way to it, green water, white froth.
She reached it at the same time as a man with a wide walrus moustache; he grabbed it by the bow, she the stern. They briefly locked eyes, then both turned away again, searching their surroundings.
There were people everywhere, alive and dead, wreckage everywhere, deck chairs, planks, ropes, shattered boats, barrels and oars. A pair of guinea hens in a coop next to a life buoy squawked and threw themselves against the wood, scattering feathers.
She forced herself to look at the people, no matter the blood, no matter the gore. Charles and George were nowhere in sight.
A stoker swam up beside her, startling blue eyes in a face still blackened with soot. Like her, he dug his fingers into the scalloped edges of the wood and tried to inch higher.
A woman nearby was wailing and sputtering. Rita twisted in place and saw that she was struggling to keep her head above water, despite the fact that she was in a life jacket. But it was backward, Rita realized. Just as her own had been before George fixed it.
“Here,” she called hoarsely, still holding on to the overturned boat but reaching out an arm to the woman. “Swim over here.”
Slowly, awkwardly, the woman did. Rita grabbed her by the sleeve and pulled her the rest of the way to the boat. Then, like everyone else around her who still could, she turned to watch the end of the Lusitania.
The steamer was still groaning, venting steam and smoke as her stern lifted higher above the waterline.
Lifeboats dangled crookedly down her hull, white against dark.
Wires and aerials fell every which way; the funnels were collapsing.
Portholes were exploding open, rings of brass flung bright and blazing into the air as the pressure inside the sinking ship built.
As her end rose, her four giant bronze propellers broke free of the water, liquid pouring from the blades, blinding and beautiful, ropes of diamonds falling back into the sea.
Two-thirds of the liner was underwater; she tilted so far starboard it seemed a wonder she hadn’t already toppled over. Still people clung to the railings, swung from the falls.
As the stern began to disappear beneath the waves, they jumped or tumbled from the sides. More than a few struck the propellers on their way down.
Then the Lusitania was gone, swallowed beneath the skin of the sea.
Seconds later came a mighty underwater BOOM, an eruption of boiling ocean and debris that pushed people and corpses and wreckage far and wide, a tsunami of the dead and desperate rolling toward them, the water stained with blood.
Rita turned her back to it, trying to climb higher up the lifeboat. Her stocking feet slipped for purchase against the wood; both of her boots had been torn away by the suction.
IT WAS 2:28 P.M. on that lovely May day.
A mere eighteen minutes since the German torpedo had sliced across the Atlantic and blown a hole as large as a house into Lusitania’s starboard hull, rendering moot all standard disaster protocols: the watertight doors, the lifeboats, women and children first.
Twenty-five minutes since Rita had placed her linen napkin on the dining saloon table and risen from her chair, her luncheon finished.
THE OVERTURNED LIFEBOAT still had its canvas cover attached.
The stoker was working at the ropes, attempting to loosen them so they could flip the boat right-side up, as more and more people swam up or drifted up, trying to gain a handhold on the steep, curving sides.
The undersea explosion had scattered everyone and everything in a wide crescent at least a half mile across, but people—the people still alive—were doing what they could to stay afloat, clinging to oars, to boxes, to narrow strips of planking.
Apparently a few lifeboats had successfully launched after all, but nearly all of them were filled, and none rowed close.
They remained far away along the blue, nowhere near the swath of the dead and living bobbing in the water.
None of them even tried to row close, no matter how many arms waved, how many voices begged.
Rita had managed to climb as high as she could up the craft, hooking one hand over the thick, flat base of the keel, using the other to tug along the woman with the backward jacket.
“I’m terribly sorry,” the lady was saying, trying to follow her. “So sorry. I believe I’ve injured my shoulder.”
“It’s all right,” Rita panted, pulling her higher. “Here, just hold on here.”
“Have you seen my girls?” the lady asked. Sunlight cast gold along her dark blond hair, dripping with water. A tortoiseshell comb was still neatly fixed in her chignon. “Anna and Gwen? Have you seen them?”
“I haven’t. I’m sorry. Just hold on right here, all right? Keep holding on.”
The boat was being overrun. A thicket of survivors had spotted them, were splashing their way to them, pushing aside the floating rubble in their paths.
Pushing aside the dead, men and women and even children, so many children, faceup or facedown, water lapping their heads, smoothing slick over their soft faces.
Some were still in the arms of their mothers, the life jackets keeping them tragically afloat.
Hands smacked against the wooden shell, a hollow banging; bodies heaved upward.
Inch by inch, the lifeboat was sinking. The stoker and a few of the other men were telling the newcomers to stop, to go back, find something else afloat, anything else, but it didn’t matter.
Logic had fled, drowned in the cold, and the hands kept reaching.
The desperate kept flocking, yelling for help, praying for help. The boat rocked and rocked.
The sea hit her ankles. Rita sat up taller, began hunting for anything else nearby to seize, a barrel, anything, for when the entire contraption tipped.
Then, damn it, it happened. She thought it was happening, that they were being capsized.
The lifeboat listed hard and began to spin, dislodging about half the people.
The tortoiseshell comb lady next to her cried out, and Rita took her wrist with the half-formed notion of dragging her along with her when they spilled, dragging her to some new safety—but with a tremendous grating sound, another boat scraped free from under theirs.
A collapsible boat, upright, its canvas sides mostly down. But somehow it floated.
The survivors knocked loose followed it, grappling with it, some trying to clamber inside, but most clinging to the sides as it was carried away with the current.
The upturned lifeboat steadied, placid now atop the calming sea.
Rita was still stationed near the keel, clinging with all her might to the side. She looked around until she located the Irish coast off her right shoulder, only a few miles away. She squinted and searched for any sign of rescue, ships, fishing smacks, smokestacks. There was nothing.