Chapter 34
Emmeline wobbled down the narrow, abandoned hallway as gravity kept pulling her to the right. She didn’t know where the water was coming from, but it had risen up to two or three inches, and its coldness pierced through her ankles like ice.
Had she made a mistake? Had she come back to the wrong ship? No, this had to be it. The hallways looked the same as when she’d left them. But what was happening on the ship?
Relief momentarily doused her fears as voices drifted from up in front.
The water was deeper in that direction, but she needed to find someone.
She needed explanations. She pulled up her skirts and jumped through the water, finally arriving at a larger, open space, the water frothing around the benches at the side and a lower platform in the middle.
A man splashed across the room, joining a smaller group heading up a narrow staircase.
Among them—a dark-haired man in a familiar, deep blue coat.
“Theo!” Emmeline waded through, brushing the edge of the platform. “Theo!” She shouted at the top of her lungs. Why wouldn’t he respond, when she was but a few feet away from him? She reached him, yanked him by the coat; he turned, and …
She didn’t know the man.
“What’s your problem, miss?” he bit out in annoyance.
“I’m sorry, I thought you were … where did you get that coat?” It was Theo’s, for certain; she’d seen it only hours before.
“My cabin mate gave it to me. It was a fair and square exchange, so if you’re having any thoughts—”
Of course! She was so stupid. Theo had been wearing this coat on the first day she’d met him on the Titanic, but not on any of the days afterward. “Where is he now?”
“I don’t know.” The man tore out of her grasp. “I gotta go up on deck. You should, too. They’re bound to start evacuating us any minute now.”
When she still stood there, he shook his head and added, “He might be on the other side of the ship. Plenty of people went there.”
“Where?”
He sighed, turned her around, and pointed. “Down the hallway, yeah? Keep following it till the end.”
It was a wider, seemingly endless corridor, and after a second, the memory from long ago clicked into place. This was where she’d come from, before she got disoriented in a maze of smaller hallways. “Thank you!”
She ran in the pointed direction, spirits lifting as the water grew shallower.
Seconds dragged by in eternity, with only her footsteps as company, now pounding on the wooden floor.
She passed the crew staircase she remembered from before; and closed and open doors to the crew quarters—bathrooms with their lines of sinks and mirrors, cabins with steel-framed double beds, abandoned to silence.
When she’d been out on the promenade deck, the length of the ship was perfectly fitting for a walk.
Down here, it was never ending, and if the hallway wasn’t obviously straight, she’d have thought she was going in circles.
A pale, rock-like object about a foot across lay on the floor, a splattering of smaller white bits leading up to it.
She squinted at it as she approached, bending over.
The chunk reminded her of the unpolished aquamarine she’d seen in the British Museum: a perfect icy blue and sheer white with a rough surface.
She touched it, then drew her hand back at the searing cold.
Ice. What the hell was going on? Oh, and she’d forgotten to ask that man. He only mentioned an evacuation.
She stared at the chunk of ice for a moment more—how strange, this little similarity between her two lives—then focused back on her task, and resumed her run.
After an eternity more, new voices greeted her, and she hurried toward the sounds of life.
There was no large, open common room on this side, but the hallway bent around several sets of stairs filled with people.
Oh, people! How happy she was to see them again.
Even if it was chaos; even if men yelled and women scampered around and children cried.
The crowd was concentrated at the staircase. Several people craned their necks to look above, but nobody moved. “Hey,” a man on the stairs yelled. “Get going, will ya?”
Frustrated responses, both male and female, were shouted from above, the scene resembling a fervent exchange at a market.
“Theo!” Emmeline scanned the crowd. So many dark heads, so many gray and brown jackets—
“Emmeline?” One head, about halfway up the staircase, turned.
“Theo!” She tried to move past a few passengers, but with a strict, “Hey, wait in line,” they held her back.
Theo jostled toward her instead, disrupting the tightly woven crowd. Once he got free of the last few people pushing toward the staircase, Emmeline leaped into his arms, covering him with kisses.
“You remember me,” he said.
She looked into his eyes. Theo, and Leon. One and the same. “I remember you. I know you now.” She kissed him again; on the lips, on the cheeks, on his nose. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry I’m late, or that I sent you here too early.”
“I’m not,” he said, smiling as he held her face. “Up to this night, it’s been quite entertaining.”
“What’s happening?”
“They say we’ve struck an iceberg. I don’t know—I was in my cabin, and water started leaking in. Stewards came to tell us to get ready, that we’re going to board the lifeboats, but not to worry, it’s only a precaution.”
The chunk of ice. The water filling the other side of the ship, growing deeper by the second. This didn’t feel like a precaution.
“My family,” she said. “I need to find them.”
Theo looked up the stairs. “I’m sure your family was alerted, as well. We’ll find them on deck. But nobody’s come told us how to get to the boats. Only that we should gather upstairs, in the smoking room.”
Emmeline was about to say, “I know where to go,” but a frantic look around stopped the words from leaving her lips.
Did she know? She knew where the boats were, when she’d been walking along the promenade—but that was an entire ship’s maze away from them, and she had no clue how to get to it from here.
Her feet quivered; perhaps from the cold, but also from the nerves.
She didn’t like being down here. That long abandoned hallway and its implications made her nauseous, and a feeling deep in her gut whispered to her they shouldn’t wait for someone to come and give them instructions. They shouldn’t lose any more time.
Hold on—she knew one exit out of here. The crew staircase. “Come!” She grabbed Theo’s hand and pulled him toward the hallway. “I know another way out. We can get to the grand staircase. It’ll be easier from there.”
Theo let her lead the way, and back into the gloom they went.
Past the doors again, past the chunk of ice, and there!
The staircase. She swung around the railing.
“Down here! We can get through the linen closets to the Turkish baths, and from there, it’s straight up to—” As she rushed down the stairs, water came to greet her.
But this one was worse. Not just a few inches; the stairs disappeared into several feet of bottle-green void.
Theo stopped behind her. “How far is it to the baths?”
If only she could remember—but it was almost a year ago now, and when she’d last made her way through here, she was pushing forward in anger without taking much heed of where or how she was going. “I don’t know. At least an entire hallway. Two.”
He stepped into the water, up to his knees, and shivered. Emmeline pulled him back. “No, you can’t go. We have to find another way.”
They backed out, returning to the corridor. Should they go back to the aft staircases? But by now, they’d be even worse off. More people would’ve gotten in line before them, and they’d already been at the back. Emmeline glanced around, biting her lip. “What about the crew? How do they get out?”
Theo’s eyes widened. “The emergency exits. By the funnels. I saw crewmen checking them a few days ago.” He tried the other doors, yanking on the handles one by one. She followed him down the tilted hallway even as water started licking at their feet again.
“This one.” The door in question was a smaller one, offset from the floor by about a foot. An electric light beside it blinked white, illuminating a single silver knob without a visible keyhole. Theo pulled, but it didn’t give.
“Wait here,” he said and started running down the hallway.
“Theo—”
“I’ll be back in a minute, I promise.”
Emmeline hugged her middle, leaned on the wall, and tried to keep her teeth from chattering.
When she wasn’t focusing on something else, the cold gripping her feet became much more noticeable.
She could barely feel her toes now; the ice was penetrating into her bones, spreading up her legs, whispering into her heart—the ship is going down, and all of you with it.
She shouldn’t have sent Theo into this doom. Perhaps she shouldn’t have come back, either, but she couldn’t leave now, not with her family here, possibly also struggling for their survival. She wasn’t leaving this ship without them or Theo.
Splashes sounded again as Theo returned from behind a corner, carrying with him a wrench the size of his forearm.
“Watertight door in the dining room,” he explained and lodged the wrench behind the doorknob.
She moved aside to leave him space for the correct grip.
He pressed hard on the wrench and toward the wall, using it as leverage, and with a pop, the knob went flying off the door.
Theo nudged the door. It swung open.
“You’re a genius.” She gave him a quick kiss.
“Inside.” He let her go first. The change from the corridor was immediate—her feet met a warm, dry iron catwalk running squarely around the enclosed space.
Above her, the catwalk merged into a forest of iron, the few lamps casting their shadows on the walls.
But every catwalk led to a ladder, and up and up and up it went—to an exit, surely.
Theo stepped in behind her, securing her waist as he looked down, even though a simple chrome railing protected them from falling.
A large metal pipe ran the length of the vent above them and dropped below into a carfuffle of machinery.
Emmeline didn’t know what it all was, but there were massive levers and bolted cylinders and even more catwalks looming precariously over that machinery.
What was even more terrifying, though, was the rush of water coming from below.
Much like her, Theo stared into the bowels of the ship, partially in awe, partially in fright. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he whispered. “A ship with an engine to pull her, instead of sails. It’s outlandish.”
“Wait until you see automobiles,” she said, her mood lifting slightly now that she was in a dry, warmer space and the exit was in sight.
“What?”
“Father will explain. He makes them.” She looked at the ladder. “Shall we?”
He went over and shook it. “It’s solid. Go. I’ll be right behind.”
She stepped to the ladder. The rungs were warm, too; from the heat of the engines coming from below, perhaps. A bit slippery, but she’d watch her grip.
She grabbed the ladder, and they climbed.