Chapter 19
After my spell in the conservatory, I was determined to head into town.
I knew that George was on the Lusitania (nothing mystic or mysterious there; we had coordinated our schedules), and I knew, everyone knew, that the Lusitania was considered a particularly plum prize by the Huns.
The London papers had devoted a great many columns to it, and to the warning that the Imperial German Embassy had advertised in New York.
So I knew that something had happened to the Lusitania because I knew, in my heart and bones, that something had happened to my husband. The ship must have gone down. I knew that as well, but I did not know where.
Maman had set off that morning to pay a call on our lord-lieutenant.
You know her; she was still pulling every string she could to spare Alfred from the clutches of the army, or at least spare him the front.
Alfred and Papa, however, were more philosophical about it all, or perhaps just more realistic.
On that pretty Friday, one of their last days together, they had gone fishing.
(Alfred doesn’t know about Maman’s visit to the lord-lieutenant, by the way, so please don’t tell him. It would upset him so.)
So I was alone at Winter Queen. I packed a bag as quickly as I could and had the auto take me into Medmenham.
I took a seat inside the Ruby Rabbit, nursing a cider.
It wasn’t long before the first fellow burst in with the news.
He worked at the telegraph office and was brimming with importance, but almost at once he was followed by what seemed a score more people who knew: The Lusitania had been hit, but she was still afloat.
No, she had been hit and had sunk. All passengers and crew had been saved. No, nearly everyone had perished.
“Where?” I demanded of anyone, everyone. “Where was she torpedoed?”
“Ireland,” I was told. It was the one fact they all agreed upon. “Off Queenstown.”
I left my cider on the bar, got back into the auto, and had the chauffer take me to the train station.
SATURDAY, MAY 8, 1915
QUEENSTOWN, IRELAND
The next morning, Rita began to walk. First, however, she needed some shoes.
It turned out that the hotel’s head housekeeper wore the same size as she and stored her walking-to-work boots in her cubby (her actual work shoes, as she pointed out, pulling back her skirts, were black patent, much finer), so Rita promised her, promised, that she would purchase the lady brand-new boots as soon as she had access to her funds, and that she’d also replace the pair of handknitted socks offered with them, actually being made for the woman’s grandson, nearly finished.
“Any sort of shoe you want,” Rita vowed. “Boots, heels, satin dancing slippers. From any shoemaker anywhere, anywhere in the world.”
The housekeeper clucked her tongue, handing everything over.
She was pleasantly round-faced, pink-cheeked, strands of hair coming loose from under her cap.
“Dancing slippers! As if I would! None of that, now. I know who y’are.
Seen a few of them moving pictures shows with you in them, miss. I don’t be doubting your word.”
So when Rita ventured out of the Queen’s Hotel’s tastefully carved facade that Saturday morning, no later than eight, she was a striking figure in torn and salt-stained silk that wafted behind her as she moved, a long bristly braid and scuffed brown leather boots, no heel, that laced up past her ankles.
QUEENSTOWN WAS NOW packed with officials.
Even more of them poured in from all corners, company men and military men, all of them hurrying along, all of them performing some vital task in an attempt to contain a tragedy that could not and would not be contained.
When she asked how she might send a wire, she was directed to the post office along the harbor front, where she stood in line to send a free message, curtesy of the Cunard Line, to whomever mattered most.
The gulls cried above her as she waited, circling and dipping. Her eyes followed them, how they plunged and flapped their wings and landed clumsily on the wooden posts dotting the harbor, lifting their orange feet, clacking their orange beaks.
Hungry, she thought. She pressed the heel of her palm to the center of her forehead, trying to erase the image of them gorging on the dead. They look hungry still; are they ever sated?
When it came her turn, Rita was tired and thirsty again.
She sorely missed breakfast or whatever passed for breakfast back at the hotel; there’d been nothing set out in the lobby or dining area when she’d left, not even lemonade.
She stood at the post office window, chewing her lip, as the clerk stared at her from behind his metal bars (so like the purser’s office onboard the Lusitania; so different!), his pencil poised over the paper slip.
“Miss?” he prompted, his mouth a downward curve. Behind her, people shifted on their feet, huffed and sighed. A few of the women were quietly sobbing.
“To Count de Cippico,” Rita began. “In Naples, Italy.” She paused, looked at him. “I’ll spell it out for you, shall I?”
OUTSIDE THE POST office, tacked to a wooden signboard, was a handwritten list of names on three long, wind-tattered sheets of paper already grimed along the edges.
The ink was smeared from countless hands pressing down, holding the sheets in place against the breeze as people scanned the names of the Known Saved.
Rita joined the subdued group gathered around it.
She quickly picked out her own name on that list, Lady Allan’s just below it.
She pushed closer and started over, ran her finger down the first page, the second, the third.
Barring Captain Turner, there was no one else she knew, not personally.
If George or Charles or the two Allan girls had landed safely, their names had not been added yet.
Not yet.
QUEENSTOWN WAS A picturesque port by any measure, with attractive stone and brick and wooden structures rising along gentle, treed hills.
Saint Colman’s Cathedral, with its imposing spire and French Gothic parapets and arcading, towered against cerulean skies.
Cork Harbour pulsed along her shores, sometimes misted, sometimes clear, but always providing commerce, travelers, fish.
Before the sinking, the town was perhaps best known as Titanic’s final port of call.
The press would end up calling it the “Town of the Dead,” and they weren’t wrong. Lusitania’s survivors had been whisked away to wherever there was space and willing hosts: hotels and inns, private homes, the local hospital. But the boats were still returning from sea, now laden with corpses.
At first, confusion reigned. No one knew where to put the bodies, so the seamen simply placed them along the wharves.
There was no morgue in town large enough to accommodate the growing numbers of the dead, sodden and stacked one atop another in the spare spaces around pilings and ropes and barrels.
Limp, wet arms jutting out. Limp, wet clothing, those that still had any.
Blanched faces, blood and mucus. Gulls. Flies.
Corpses were piling up by the hundreds.
Cunard began to direct the bodies to a hastily emptied shed on their quay, shielding the victims from the increasingly warm day at least.
But it wasn’t enough. As the hours passed and the dead continued to be salvaged, the town hall was converted into a temporary morgue as well, and then a vacant building on the water that used to be a chandlery.
The sun slanted higher into the blue. The stench grew unavoidable, unmistakable. Unbearable. And still the bodies came in.
RITA VISITED EVERY hotel or inn she could find, walking, walking, her sore muscles protesting every step.
Inside each location, she inquired about her men and Lady Allan’s girls.
Most of the proprietors had already started compiling the names of their unexpected guests, so it wasn’t hard. It was, however, fruitless.
After her sixth disappointment, she paused by a little garden outside a bakery, her hands over her stomach.
She still hadn’t eaten a decent meal since her luncheon aboard the liner.
On her rounds, she’d asked for, and been given, water, and then tea, and then a single boiled egg, smuggled to her by a sympathetic kitchen maid.
But Rita had no money, no banker’s draft, no passport.
No way of proving who she was to any proper bank, unless she happened to encounter another photoplay fan.
When she looked up, she saw the Cunard man of last night, with the fox-head stickpin, hurrying along the cobbles, sunlight on his shoulders, his head low.
She sprinted after him. “Sir! Sir!”
He slowed, threw her an impatient glance, then recognized her. He stopped, pushed back his hat.
“Miss Jolivet.”
“I’ve been—” she paused to catch her breath, and the man spoke over her, looking her up and down.
“Has no one told you about our credit arrangements with the town’s outfitters?”
She shook her head. He took a notepad from his jacket pocket, scribbled something down, then tore off the page and handed it to her.
“Try this shop. They have women’s items. Nothing as fine as you’re used to, I’m sure, but …”
“Yes, I will, thank you.”
“Tell them you’re from the ship. They should be able to take care of you.”
“Thank you,” she said again. “But what I really need is something to eat.”
He looked taken aback. “There was nothing at the hotel?”
“No.”
“And … forgive me, you have no funds?”
She very nearly snapped, I’m afraid all my diamonds went down with your ship, but didn’t.
Instead, she opened her arms, palms up, showing him her tattered gown, her bruised skin, then turned inside out her solitary pocket. No reticule, not even the pistol, which she’d left back in the hotel room.
The man frowned, dug into a different pocket. He pulled out a pound note, pressed it into her palm.