Chapter 2 #3
“I’m eighty-one years old. I may have a year or two left.
I’m not going to drag one of those women or children out of the boat so I can have another year, and rob them of an entire lifetime.
I’m not leaving. Victoria’s a strong girl, she’ll be fine.
” Then he looked at Bert intently, his eyes like burning coals as he stared at Bert.
“Swear to me you’ll stay close to her, take care of her.
She’s a good woman, she’ll be good to you.
She needs someone like you, Bert. Marry her.
No one younger than you will understand her.
I am leaving you my most precious possession.
Now get in a goddamn lifeboat, get the hell off this boat, and take care of her for me.
” Bert could see that he meant it, and he felt torn and wasn’t sure what to do.
He could have overpowered him and forced him into a lifeboat, and stayed on the sinking ship himself.
He wasn’t young either and had had a good life.
But Alfred was stubborn and didn’t want to rob anyone of their chance to live.
“Come with me,” Bert said to him, feeling desperate, and tried to pull Alfred along, but he broke free and shouted at him.
“Go! She needs you more than she needs me. Be good to her, Bert, or I’ll haunt you to the end of your days.
” Bert nodded, squeezed his arm, and ran for the last lifeboat he could see loading on their deck.
There were still one or two places in it.
He turned back and beckoned to Alfred, who shook his head, and stood nobly on the deck as it tipped toward the bow of the ship.
Bert got the last seat in the last lifeboat, and it was lowered the short distance to the water.
It was two-fifteen. Two minutes later the last distress signal was sent by the Titanic.
A minute later, the ship’s lights went out and there was a horrendous crashing sound as the ship broke in two, and a minute after that, the bow began to sink, and seconds later the stern disappeared into the ocean and the Titanic was gone.
The ship that couldn’t sink just had, too damaged by the iceberg, which had torn a gash in its hull.
The ship was doomed the moment they hit the iceberg, and sank two and a half hours later.
There were hundreds of people in the icy water.
People were crying out, some were shouting, bodies were already floating by.
With many of the lifeboats half empty, the crew members in the lifeboats managed to pull a few people out of the water and into the lifeboats, while everyone in them screamed, afraid that the lifeboats would capsize.
People in the water were begging for help, and no help came.
The sound of their cries for help was deafening at first, and then the voices went silent one by one as people died of exposure in the frigid water.
Bert was shivering himself, and all he could do was pray that Alfred had gotten into one of the other last boats to leave the ship, or that he was in the icy water and someone would rescue him.
He didn’t see him in the water anywhere nearby, or in the closest boats.
He didn’t see Victoria either. He tried to stare into the other lifeboats, and he called her name a few times, but he didn’t see her.
He was in a boat full of strangers, with several small shivering children and their crying mothers.
There was only one other male passenger in Bert’s boat, and a crew member.
The full impact of what had happened hadn’t hit him yet.
It was too shocking to understand or believe.
Victoria’s father had told him, ordered him, to take care of her, to marry her, and be good to her.
Bert was sure that Victoria herself would be appalled at the idea.
She had told him that she had never wanted to marry.
She was expecting to take care of her father for as long as he lived.
This wasn’t how she had expected it to end.
Victoria had no need of Bert. She would have her father’s fortune if he didn’t survive, and she came from a world that would shun her forever if she married Bert.
He was not welcome in her world. He couldn’t do that to her.
Her father hadn’t been thinking clearly in those final desperate minutes before the ship sank.
But the look in his eyes had been intense.
Alfred was desperate to know that Bert would take care of Victoria.
He couldn’t think of doing that without marrying her and ruining her life.
He wondered if any of them would survive the night, and prayed that her father had, for Victoria’s sake.
A little over an hour after the Titanic sank, the Carpathia arrived.
It took hours to pick up all the survivors.
There were only a few weak shouts from the water by then, and mostly bodies floating in the water.
The crew emptied the lifeboats onto the Carpathia.
There were seven hundred and five survivors.
Fifteen hundred people had died when the Titanic sank.
When the Californian arrived on the scene six hours after the ship sank, there were no survivors left in the water, only bodies. The crew retrieved as many as they could to bring back with them, to be identified when they reached land.
* * *
It took Bert a full day to find Victoria among the survivors on the Carpathia.
She was wrapped in a blanket and huddled in a corner in one of the many areas they had assigned the survivors.
She was surrounded by women and children.
He almost didn’t recognize her, her blond hair in a tangle, wearing someone else’s clothes, with a child in her arms that wasn’t hers.
They hadn’t been able to locate its mother.
Victoria’s eyes were huge in her face when she saw Bert towering above her, and he knelt down beside her, gently stroked her face and her hair, and pulled her into his arms and held her.
They had all been through a terrible ordeal they would never forget.
“Where’s Papa?” she asked in a whisper.
“We don’t know yet. He may be here. I haven’t found him yet. It took me since yesterday to find you. They’ve got the survivors all over the place on the ship.”
“Did he leave with you?” she asked. She sounded weak and exhausted.
She was still in shock from what they’d been through.
Bert was shaken too. He hadn’t felt that way since his wife’s death, when they were both young.
She had loved to ice skate, and there was a frozen pond where she went to skate alone sometimes, although he had told her not to.
She had fallen through the ice and drowned.
She was dead when he found her. They had no children and he had never married again.
He had been a widower for thirty-two years, and now Victoria’s father had told him to marry her.
But whatever happened, they had formed a bond, and they could be friends.
He was still hoping her father was alive, and so was she.
He held her until she fell asleep in his arms, wrapped in the rough blanket. Someone had taken the child she’d been holding.
The Carpathia docked in New York on the eighteenth of April, three days after the Titanic sank. The ship that couldn’t sink, according to its architects.
The captain of the Carpathia had the full list of survivors ready by the time they docked, except for the children who were too young to identify themselves.
They checked the names of the survivors against the passenger list when they reached New York, to see who was missing.
There hadn’t been enough lifeboats to save all of the crew and passengers, which made the lifeboats that had left the ship half empty even more tragic.
The Carpathia had carried mostly women and children back to New York, but there were men too, and some crew members.
The crew had suffered the greatest losses.
They had stayed on the ship until the bitter end to help the passengers and most of them had died in the frigid waters after it sank.
The second- and third-class passengers hadn’t fared as well as those in first class.
Victoria had searched all over the Carpathia, and she couldn’t find her father’s valet, Robert, or her maid, Bridget.
Or her father. It took several days to compile the list of victims, and when they did, her father’s name was on it.
They had found his body in the freezing water.
Jacob Astor had died in the water too, but his wife Madeleine was on the list of survivors.
Robert and Bridget had not survived either.
But the head of the White Star Line, Bruce Ismay, had escaped in a lifeboat, while Thomas Andrews, the ship’s architect, had stayed and gone down with the ship.
Bert took Victoria to the Vanderbilt Hotel, where she and Alfred had reservations, and others stayed at the Jane Hotel.
Bert was staying there too. He checked on Victoria constantly to make sure she was all right.
She didn’t leave the hotel. He never told her about what her father wanted him to do.
He was afraid she would hate him for it, and he was certain she wouldn’t want to marry him, not a beautiful young woman like her.
He was willing to be her guardian angel of sorts, for as long as she needed one.
She was still in shock when they arrived at the hotel.
He asked the manager to call a doctor for her.
The doctor examined her carefully and said that she was suffering from trauma, and that she should stay in bed for a few days until she felt better.
Her body would tell her when she could get up.
In the meantime, she lay in bed, thinking about her father freezing to death in the icy water.
She was alone in the world now, except for a kind man she barely knew.