Chapter 18 #2
Surely they knew about the sinking, though. Surely they’d seen it, they’d heard it—
The ship’s wireless operators must have had time to send out a distress call—
A woman hanging from the other side of the craft cried out, pointing away from the land, toward the open sea.
“Look there! There they are!”
Oh, God. Not rescue, and not far, not even as far as the coast: a submarine had erupted from the sea, iron gray, streaming water, its blunt nose aimed at them. It floated there in place, faceless, no men emerging, but clearly a predator observing the death throes of its prey.
“They won’t shoot us again,” the man with the walrus moustache said, but he sounded unconvinced. “There’d be no point to it. They won’t target us again.”
The stoker snorted. “You sure about that, mate?” He made a rude gesture with his hand toward the U-boat.
Figli di puttana, Rita said to them, under her breath. Perhaps they were watching, perhaps they could read lips, perhaps they spoke Italian as well as German. She hoped they did.
“You sons of whores,” she yelled, rising to her knees. She would have said worse, but it was the worst profanity she knew.
The U-boat maneuvered a slow circle around the wreckage. Then, silent and swift, it submerged again, not even a periscope visible among the dead.
Everything smelled of blood and salt.
THE NEXT FOUR hours took on a monstrous, hallucinogenic quality; time slowed down.
They’d never managed to flip over the boat, but Rita was able to stay more or less above the waterline.
Barely. The sun blazed hot but the water was so cold, and she found that at times she had to drop down and submerge her legs or splash water on her chest and arms, because otherwise she was burning up, the top of her head scorched, her tongue swollen.
“Have you seen my daughters?” the lady with the injured shoulder kept muttering. “They were in the water with me. We were together. We all jumped together. Have you seen them?”
“No,” Rita always answered, stroking her good arm. “No, but we’ll keep searching.”
The fact was, she wasn’t really searching for Gwen and Anna, the daughters of Marguerite, Lady Allan.
(Why, we share the same given name, Rita had told her, after coaxing Lady Allan into supplying it. Rita tried to sound encouraging, cheerfully distracting; the other woman’s face was already red with fever or sun. Isn’t that something?
Which name? Lady Allan had replied, her eyes glazed. Which are you, Gwen or Anna?)
Rita wasn’t searching for a pair of girls she’d never seen, never met, could not possibly recognize, even among the floating dead.
She was searching for George, beloved of Inez.
For Charles, beloved of her. For Captain Scott, so gallant.
For Jenny or even Alfred Vanderbilt, or Staff Captain Anderson, Captain Turner. Eleanor. People whose faces she knew.
There were so many dead. And so many still mumbling for help, still pleading and sobbing, although less than had been there an hour before. Or two.
Those without lifebelts sank into silence, one by one. Those with lifebelts but injuries, broken limbs, smashed bodies, bleeding heads … those folks only settled into a whimpering quiet, and then quiet absolute.
The dogs had continued their distraught barking for about a quarter of an hour after the sinking.
The hens in their coop had lasted only minutes.
As the lifeboat moved through a plume of blood flowing from a cluster of bodies trapped in wreckage nearby, arms wide out, heads back, mouths open—don’t look, don’t look—Rita began to wonder about sharks.
Were there sharks off Ireland? She tried to remember her lessons, those long-ago instructions from her tutors, and couldn’t.
Yes, there were sharks. No, there weren’t. The water was opaque either way, hiding any kind of monster.
She wanted to think about her beloveds. She wanted to think about Giuseppe, wonderful Giuseppe.
Her parents, her sister and brother. But what she found herself remembering instead was that bloated, gray face from her childhood, the son of the gardener who’d drowned in the koi pond.
The horror that had crawled through her upon finding him.
The way his body had vanished halfway into the murk but his hair still stirred, the fish still came up and tested their mouths against him—
“Stop it,” she scolded herself, but had to bend over to hide her face in one hand. She could not waste the tears. “Just stop.”
Lady Allan brushed her fingers along Rita’s hair, carefully, tenderly, all the way from her crown to her waist.
“Have you seen my daughters,” she whispered, pressing close.
THE WORLD SLURRED into the unreal. She was too cold, and she was too hot; she flashed from one to the other, only sometimes she was both. Lady Allan had stopped mumbling, her chin to her chest, but her body still slumped against Rita’s.
Seagulls spiraled above them all, white and black against the peaceful blue, descending to alight upon the corpses and the living, testing to see what was what.
The people still alive swiped at them feebly but the dead had no defenses, and the gulls soon figured out the difference. They began to feast.
Porpoises danced among them, great black porpoises. Rita thought them sharks at first, but no, they were porpoises, with smiling beaks and shiny eyes, frolicking, spouting water, as if their games in the sea today were like any other day, and the entire world held their joy.
She heard singing. A celestial chorus accompanied by symphonies, by hundreds of orchestras and a long, low wailing that slowly faded to silence.
The sky became crowded with angels.
Rita gazed up at them, awestruck. They were white and lacy as clouds. They reached down to her and she tried to reach back, she wanted to reach back, but her fingers were frozen into claws along the ridges of the boat. She could not unclench them.
The angels raised their arms. They summoned a circle of stars, right there in the middle of the day. A crown of stars that descended to her, glorious and spinning, so glorious she had to close her eyes and drop her head and sleep.
She had to sleep.
“OY, SHE ALIVE or dead?”
“Alive, I think. Hey, you, miss! Wake up, eh?”
Rita was on her back, flat on her back, not clinging sideways to the lifeboat like a decrepit mermaid. She was …
Someone slapped her cheek. She turned her head, gasping. Her spine ached, her body ached, her eyes could hardly open, crusted with salt. She tried to rub away the crust, and moving her hand was like moving a sack of meat, no feeling, no heat or cold. It was something apart from her.
“There she is!” said that same voice, encouraging. Young. Male. Cockney? “All right, luv. You wait here, eh? You wait here for me. I’ll nip down to the galley and be back in a jiff.”
Her eyelids slitted open. It seemed dark to her, almost dark, but as she stared upward at the—
—clouds? were they angels or clouds?—
—sky streaked with colors, she realized that she was lying on something hard and flat. Something uncomfortable that was rocking, moving up and down, roiling her empty stomach.
Sunset flamed above her, a vault of pink and orange and vermilion. She was on the deck of a boat, some sort of boat.
Rita tried to sit up, struggling against a blanket tucked around her. An unfamiliar woman with dark blond hair leaned over her with a frown. She had one arm in a sling.
“Don’t move yet. We’re on the Katrina.”
“The …”
“Greek-flagged, but I’d be surprised. The sailors aboard seem about as Greek as I. Yours will be returning any moment now with a mug of hot tea. Ceylon, if I’m not mistaken.”
Rita rubbed her meat hand against her face. Her voice came out in a croak. “Am I alive? Is this a dream?”
The woman shook her head, considering it. “I don’t know.”
What? she tried to say, but what little saliva there’d been in her mouth was now gone. Her tongue was a strip of leather, as foreign as her hands, and all the angels were gone as if they had never been.
“You saved me,” the woman said. She took Rita’s numb hand and pressed it to the side of her neck, bowing her head. Her chest began to hitch.
Rita scowled, remembering her now, remembering her loss.
“Don’t cry,” she managed to rasp. “Marguerite, no. Don’t cry. Not yet.”
THE TEA WAS scalding. She held the thick, chipped mug with both hands as slowly the feeling returned to her fingers.
It was a good ship’s mug, heavy and plain, in this moment more precious than the finest bone china.
Finer than solid gold. The chips detracted nothing from her relief at holding it, from sipping that hot Ceylon or whatever it was.
She could scarcely taste it, but by gosh, she could feel its heat.
The sailor had brought her a slice of jam tart as well, cupped in a paper napkin, messy strawberry goo smearing his fingers as he handed it to her.
That wedge of shortbread and jam was the most delicious thing Rita had ever tasted and ever would again.
She devoured it, down to the final crumb, then sucked the last hint of strawberry from her nailbeds.
If she could have eaten the napkin, she would have.
Lady Allan had been correct. Despite its jaunty blue-and-white flag, the Katrina wasn’t a Greek fishing vessel at all.
It was the SS Westborough, a British merchant ship in disguise, and her crew knew the filigreed coast of Ireland and the waters off of it as sure as they knew their way home.
They’d picked up as many survivors as could fit on board—maybe a few too many—and were now steaming toward Queenstown.
But they were still miles and miles away. It had taken hours to reach the wreckage of the Lusitania, and it would take hours more to make it to port.