Chapter 18 #3
The two Marguerites sat beside each other on the deck with their backs against the hull, arms and knees touching, both wrapped in blankets, both with refilled mugs of tea, a little weaker this time but still hot.
A pile of life jackets slowly leaked seawater along the forecastle, although some of the survivors refused to take theirs off.
The air felt mild now, almost pleasant. The pinkish gold sky was dimming into mother-of-pearl.
Compared to the Lusy, the Katrina—the Westborough, Rita corrected herself—seemed to chug along at a snail’s pace.
But at least they were afloat. At least they were alive.
At least someone had come for them.
In fact, broadsheets around the world in the upcoming days and weeks would print dramatic firsthand accounts from sailors and townsfolk about the plucky fleet of vessels around Queenstown and Kinsale that had raced out to help as soon as they could, as soon as word of the torpedoing of the Lusitania spread like wildfire around the towns and along the wirelesses.
Humble local fishing boats, rusting merchant boats, tugs, trawlers, an old ferry, even a rowboat, all of them speeding as fast as they could, all of them braving the risk of more submarines, more attacks.
And all of them scooping up as many survivors as they could, in every condition imaginable.
(By Saturday morning, when it was clear there were no more survivors to be found, many of those same boats would return—paid, this time, by Cunard—to scoop up the dead.)
The Westborough plowed through the dusk.
Her deck was crammed with bedraggled people, many clutching injuries, many bleeding.
A doctor moved among them, asking soft questions, applying bandages and aid when he could.
They huddled together, those poor tattered souls, whispering together, moaning or sometimes weeping together.
A man with a smashed leg stretched out before him, blood and pulp, the bone jutting out, begged for opium, for rum, anything to stop the agony. Eventually, he was carried away on a blanket by a pair of sailors, and his pleas grew inaudible.
Every now and again, a round of cackling laughter would erupt from some knot of souls, edged with hysteria. It spread, contagious, from person to person, lasting minutes before dying down.
Lady Allan was leaning more and more of her weight against Rita, her eyes swollen shut, her head coming to rest on Rita’s shoulder; Rita did her best to keep them both upright.
A woman a few feet away was invoking the name of the Almighty in a husky voice, but she couldn’t seem to complete her prayer.
Dear Lord, please … Dear Lord, please …
Numb with exhaustion, Rita wasn’t sure what was left to pray about anymore, either.
Gwen. Anna. George and Charles. Dear Lord, please, all of them safe on another boat.
A stack of clouds hugged the skyline to the southwest, deep blue ink splintered with flashes of white. A distant storm, brushing along waters Rita would never know. Or maybe those angels saying Hello, you’re awake and alive, hello.
HER TEA-AND-TART sailor came over and told her that, although he had looked, he hadn’t discovered an extra pair of socks for her, and he’d give her his own, but they had so many holes in them she’d likely be better off without them.
He offered instead to wrap her bare feet in some newspapers that he had scavenged.
Rita gratefully accepted, and he knelt before her, gently lifting one foot, then the other, bundling them in the crackling paper, tying everything in place with string that he cut with a wicked-looking knife.
Across the deck, the doctor was working over a man writhing and choking in pain.
With his back to Rita, she couldn’t see what the doctor was doing, but when he straightened he was holding an arm in his hands.
A severed arm, still dripping blood, clearly visible by the running lights.
He tossed it over the side of the boat, just as someone might do a fish they’d hooked that was too small.
AFTER THE SECOND hour of Lady Allan slumped against her, Rita shifted some, trying to ease the ache in her back, then shifted again. An odd, hard stone dug into her thigh.
She ran a hand down her side, encountering the stitched pocket in her dress.
It was her pistol, her good luck charm. Her reticule and everything in it was long gone, surrendered to the Atlantic, but her pistol was still in that pocket. Throughout everything, it was still there.
To be honest, she’d forgotten all about it.
THEY REACHED QUEENSTOWN around one in the morning.
Rita carefully disentangled herself from Marguerite Allan and stood to watch the approach of the wharf, a line of gaslights flickering uneasily along the quay.
As the Westborough drew nearer, she was able to make out shadows of people standing around, staggering around, maybe even crowds of people but indistinct beyond the lights, like packs of dogs lurking in the darkness.
The press, she thought, but the worry drifted away from her, unmoored.
A bed, she thought. Shelter. Food. Sleep. And those were the worries that burrowed into her.
For the first time in hours, she heard babies crying, held in the arms of the people watching and waiting on the shore.
Oh, good, she thought, floaty and distant. Good. They made it, some of them made it.
The Westborough’s crew wove through the crowd on the deck, preparing to dock. Rita scanned the quay, her mind sharp and blurred at the same time, searching for the person most likely to be in charge. Anyone still in a hat, perhaps. In a uniform. With an assistant, or carrying a clipboard.
Lady Allan, bereft of her daughters, needed a real bed. She needed rest. Rita could do that much, at least. She could do at least that.
The boat eased into a slip, and a mass of shadow people swept forth to meet it, held back, barely, by a line of policemen.
Even though there were no camera flashes, she instinctively reached for her hair, for her combs, and encountered only a wavy, heavy mess, thickened with salt.
She began to quickly separate it into thirds to braid it.
When it was done she pinched her cheeks and lips, forcing the blood back to her face.
She bent and whispered into Lady Allan’s ear, Stay here, I’ll come for you soon, then took her blanket and made her way toward the gangplank, her newspaper shoes rustling.
She spotted a man with a clipboard—amen!
—pacing the dock below her, gesturing to the people around him, flipping through his paperwork, pointing this way and that.
A Cunard man, then. Or the mayor. Or the chief of police. Whoever he was, that’s who she needed.
She pushed back her braid so it fell along her spine and squared her shoulders, wearing her blanket like a stole.
Others aboard began to come awake, rising and shambling toward her.
She straightened the ruined pleats of her gown, waiting for the sailor guarding the lowered gangplank to gesture her way.
He did, a quick curl of his fingers.
She wasn’t the first one off, but she was the first woman.
Instantly the people ashore began to push forward, calling out names in hopeful, cracked voices, so many names.
So many voices. Rita listened intently even as she headed toward the clipboard man, but no one was calling for her. No one sounded like George or Charles.
She tried to ignore them, the ragged figures still pushing toward the boat, men and women jostling, some clutching those crying children.
She paid a bit more attention to a group of Royal Navy sailors in uniform holding stretchers, but kept her focus on that man with the paperwork, his hair ginger or blond or pale brown under the gaslights, his moustache neat.
He wore a tailored suit and a stickpin in his tie that winked at her as she approached, a small diamond eye in the head of a fox.
“Please, sir,” she said, in her most Buckingham Palace voice, and went as far to touch her fingertips to the tweed of his sleeve. “I’ve a lady with me injured and half dead, in dire need of aid and shelter. Can you help?”
She brought a hand to her forehead, ready to feign light-headedness, but to her dismay she didn’t need to feign it. The quayside rocked beneath her papered feet, and it took a moment for the land to right itself again.
“I’m sorry,” Rita said in her normal voice, and meant it. She lowered her hand; her eyes began to tear. She swallowed, still tasting salt in her throat. “I’m sorry.”
The man gazed at her as if she were a little lost lamb who’d returned home badly shorn, a combination of pity and distress.
“I can help,” he said. “Tell me your name, miss, and hers. We’ll get you sorted.”
QUEEN’S HOTEL WAS the best in town, or so she was informed, and also one of the last that wasn’t already stuffed to the gills with the Lusitania’s anguished survivors.
Even so, Rita could see at once that best was a subjective word in this case, as the room they were assigned was small and narrow and smelled of mold, and the sheets on the two beds didn’t appear to have been changed since the last guests.
Dust lay thick across the windowsill; when she pulled her fingers away from the sash after forcing it open to dilute that smell, her hands came away smeared in grit.
She didn’t care, really. It didn’t matter. It was a room. It had beds; the beds had linens and blankets, whatever their state. There was a pitcher and bowl painted with butterflies on the bureau, fresh water ready to pour.
She helped Lady Allan into the bed by the window, removing the woman’s shoes, unbuttoning the back of her gown, loosening her corset.
It turned out that she had a broken collarbone, according to the doctor on the Westborough.
Marguerite Allan had thought that she’d injured it against a railing just as the Lusitania was beginning her final plunge. Just before she had jumped.
“Anna,” she insisted weakly now from the bed, clinging to the ripped gauze of Rita’s sleeve. Her eyes were pleading. “Gwen.”
“I know. We’ll look for them in the morning, I promise. I’ll go look. There were so many other boats out there besides ours, so no doubt they were on one of them. Right now, you need to sleep. There’s water for you there, in that glass. Do you see it? And I’ll be just across the room.”
“Yes. Yes, all right.”
The hotel’s kitchen had been closed by the time they arrived, with no one around to open it.
Several of the other guests—the regular ones—had assembled plates of sugared biscuits and jugs of lemonade, a few shots of whiskey, for the survivors coming in, but that was all.
The only person who could start up the stoves in the kitchen, open the locked larders and recall his staff was the owner, a Mr. Humbert, but no one could locate him.
(It turned out that Otto Humbert was a German immigrant. As soon as he’d heard about the sinking, he’d retreated to the wine cellar of his hotel with his family to hide, justly fearing Irish riots and reprisals.)
Rita had helped herself to two shots of whiskey and three of the thin biscuits.
Lady Allan would take none. So when Rita peeled what was left of the newspaper from her feet and unrolled her destroyed stockings down her calves, her stomach was growling but her blood was warmed by the liquor, and that was something.
She left her dress and corset to dry over a chair, keeping on her damp chemise, and pulled the blankets to her chin. She’d turned off the electric lights but left one of the oil lamps burning low, because it felt safer than the dark.
It was a good thing she did, too, because less than an hour later, when the doorknob rattled and two more frayed and shivering women were shown into the room, she was able to rise wearily and gesture to her bed before joining Lady Allan in hers.