Chapter 12
12
The next few months passed by uneventfully. Christmas was bearable, helped by the feeling that Olivia was part of a family once more, with Her Ladyship encouraging the boys to think of her as a sister. She revelled in the endearing chaos of the Fairchild household, which took her mind off things, and then found peace in the quieter moments with her night-time companion, even though she didn’t know his personal circumstances – or, rather, her mind had not fabricated any. It was refreshing spending time with someone who didn’t view her as the poor Titanic orphan, and instead thought of her as the plucky, if slightly unhinged, spirit of a medieval princess.
She noticed that Seth usually appeared very late into the night, long after she had retired, and maybe this was no coincidence. Was it possible her brain was, by that point, dancing between consciousness and her dreamworld, making her more open to an imaginary friend? Although, why her head had chosen to give him such a grumpy persona, she wasn’t sure. Maybe she had unwittingly been influenced by Tanner, or maybe it made more sense for him to be crotchety if he was to be useful in relating to her grief. Whatever the truth of it, she continued to delight in teasing the voice whose spectacles were dark, because hers were tinted pink.
The comforting delusion of such a friend continued in the background of Olivia’s life throughout the following year. Seth’s prickly nature started to soften, which she suspected was part of her healing process, and things generally settled down for her.
At the manor, Clarence began stepping out with a lovely girl who was distantly related to the royal family. It was serious enough for Lady Fairchild to look out a diamond ring of her mother’s and pass it over in the hopes that an engagement was imminent. Every school holiday, when the younger boys returned, Howard continued to annoy everyone but her, perhaps realising he’d met his match, perhaps out of sympathy. He tried the patience of his brothers with his endless pranks: packets of flour on the tops of doors, frogs in beds and desk drawers, and blacking on the eyepieces of Clarence’s field glasses – although he received a sound thrashing when that particular jape was discovered.
She still escaped to her dreamworlds but chose not to race around the estate enacting them, and was less frequently found climbing trees and imagining them to be the towering ramparts of besieged castles. Instead, she was more often seen clutching a small, leather journal and frantically scribbling down the weird and wonderful scenarios in her head. These uninvited thoughts were just as dramatic, but she was simply choosing another way to express them, and her favourite place to do so was next to the sweet-smelling honeysuckle in the Japanese gardens. Thankfully, the weather that summer proved to be a vast improvement on her first year at the manor.
Outside of Merriford Lode, however, the nation was undergoing tumultuous times. The suffragettes ramped up their action in their fight for the vote, and the country was shaken by Emily Davison’s heartbreaking sacrifice at the Epsom Derby. Olivia found common ground with Lady Fairchild over their sympathy for the brave women force-fed and ill-treated in their fight to give the gentler sex a voice. Meanwhile, Sir Hugo became increasingly concerned with the ongoing strikes, demonstrations and labour disputes that were affecting his various business interests. The alarming state of unrest in the country was one of his favourite grumbles, along with the thorny issue of home rule and Asquith’s inadequacies as prime minister.
By 1914, everyone was aware of the growing disquiet abroad. Her own father, before his death, had written about the threat of an imperialist Germany in his espionage thriller, The Mystery of the Broken Violin , foreseeing the escalating tensions in Europe. His novel had centred around the battle to have the most powerful navy in the world, and she’d had to look the word ‘militarism’ up in a dictionary. Two years later and it no longer seemed like fiction.
By that July, the possibility of war was very real, although Olivia was more concerned with the upcoming church fete, and what she might wear to attract the attention of the butcher’s son – a striking lad, who was the same age as her. She’d volunteered to run the coconut shy, hoping that, as a keen cricketer, the boy concerned would be tempted to test out his impressive overarm bowling on her stand. The assassination of some archduke she’d never heard of was nothing in comparison to her frustrations that her curly hair would never stay neatly pinned up and she always seemed to have grass stains on her skirts. It was only when there was a very real possibility of people she knew and cared for being involved that she began to appreciate the seriousness of the situation.
‘The kaiser has been coming over here, shooting at Sandringham, competing at Cowes and pretending to be a great friend of this land,’ Sir Hugo announced, tossing a newspaper across the breakfast table, with its headline announcing that Austria–Hungary had now declared war on Serbia. ‘Whilst all the time he’s been building up his armies and creating a battle fleet. Mark my words, it’s only a matter of days before all of Europe is sucked into this – which is rather what I fear he had planned for all along.’
Lady Fairchild looked most alarmed. ‘And my boys?’ she whispered.
‘When the time comes, they’ll have to do their bit and do our nation proud. And then that bellicose fool will see who he’s messing with.’
The thought that Clarence or Louis, or any of the young men she knew in the village, could be called upon to fight was not something Olivia had considered, and it preyed on her mind over the following days.
She had shared nothing of her real life with the voice through the wall since their pact and had maintained the charade of the jilted Cordelia since she’d first heard Seth two years previously. In fact, she’d created quite a detailed life for the ghostly princess: anecdotes of hunting and gaming, and fanciful tales of banquets and balls – all the things she imagined a medieval princess might have spent her days doing. Seth came to her intermittently and their conversations remained largely one-sided, as she only got grunts in reply from him or, if she was lucky, a blunt observation about the weather.
But one night, all this changed. The exceptional temperatures sweeping across the land were making everyone irritable – even Olivia. She’d been tossing and turning for hours when she heard her imaginary friend lump down on the non-existent bed with a belch, before bursting into a decidedly off-key version of a song about the ‘good old summertime’. It wasn’t a tune she’d ever heard and marvelled at how her brain had conjured up such complicated lyrics.
‘Have you been drinking?’ she moaned through the wall. ‘Because perhaps you’d like to keep the noise down for those of us who are trying to sleep.’ This had been his request when they’d first encountered one another, after all.
‘Oh, hello there, Cordelia. Forgot about you.’ There was a further squeak of bedsprings and she heard an empty bottle fall to the floor as he groaned. ‘Sometimes, I think having a resident ghost is worse than being married. I get all the nagging but none of the benefits.’
Olivia blushed, her already pink cheeks getting even hotter. She was old enough to understand his meaning.
‘As you are merely a figment of my imagination, it’s lucky that marriage is not something you have to worry about,’ she said. ‘Although I’m still bemused as to why I didn’t choose to resurrect my parents, instead of creating you. And if you’re not a product of my grieving mind but are, in fact, a genuine spirit, then I’m equally frustrated that I’m being haunted by you, instead of being contacted by them.’
‘And yet we both know that you’re the ghost, Cordelia.’
But Olivia was done with the silly charade. There were bigger things going on in the world and the time for childish games was over. Sir Hugo was convinced Britain would enter the war any day now.
‘I’m as real as the wall between us and you know it. I’ve only been pretending to be a stupid ghost because you kept insisting that I was one, and yet everyone at Merriford Manor knows my tragic circumstances because the sinking of the Titanic and deaths of my parents will follow me around for the remainder of my life. I’m grateful that you’ve helped me to navigate that, but it’s time for you to leave me now.’
‘The Titanic , as in the Harland and Wolff ship that made the news a couple of years ago?’ Seth sounded confused.
‘Yes, the one that hit an iceberg and sank to the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean, with the loss of fifteen hundred lives, including both my parents.’
‘What are you talking about? The Titanic didn’t sink. It came darn close, granted, and about two hundred people did die – mainly crew in the cargo holds and boiler rooms – but it limped to Halifax and another ship took all the passengers to New York City.’ He laughed to himself. ‘Can you imagine the public uproar if the boat had actually sunk?’
‘I don’t need to imagine it because it happened!’ She was angry now and heard her own voice crack as she ploughed on. ‘Why would you pretend otherwise? What a cruel and unkind thing to do.’
It was Seth’s turn to get cross. ‘I may be many things, missy, but I’m not a liar. I have seen with my own eyes people who survived the accident. That ship did not sink.’
Olivia relayed the facts she knew so well, almost daring him to challenge her detailed knowledge of events.
‘And I can assure you that it did. Frederick Fleet was up in the crow’s nest and saw the iceberg at thirty-nine minutes past eleven, whereupon he immediately telephoned the bridge. First Officer Murdoch sent a telegraph to the engine room and ordered the engines to be reversed, and the ship’s wheel was turned hard to starboard. The iceberg ripped through several of the watertight compartments, causing irreparable damage, as far too many were breached for the ship to stay afloat. It took nearly three hours to sink and there weren’t enough lifeboats for everyone on board, so only seven hundred and five people survived. It was a catastrophic maritime disaster on an unprecedented scale.’
There was a pause before he responded. ‘I’m pretty sure only two of them watertight compartments were breached and the front of the ship was crushed up, like a telescope. People were slammed into walls, thrown from their beds and anything that weren’t bolted down was shunted towards the front. Nearly a hundred and fifty crew died, mainly firemen, trimmers and greasers sleeping in the ship’s bow, and about sixty passengers.’
Olivia worked through the logic of his claim. Her own research over the years had suggested that there could so easily have been a scenario when her parents had survived. The whole tragedy was a catalogue of human errors, where so many tiny details were overlooked and every bad decision had conspired against them. This could have been the case, granted, but it unequivocally wasn’t.
‘No!’ Olivia shouted. ‘The lookouts saw the iceberg and the ship turned at the very last minute.’ This was too cruel.
Seth remained calm. ‘Well, it dint because the men in the crow’s nest dint spot it in time. They had no glasses; I can’t remember why – locked in some cupboard, I think – and it was pitch-black. One of them said there was this queer moment, when a shiver of something rippled through him. The newspapers loved that little detail and the headline was something like, “Lookout Senses Disaster Moments Before Impact”.’
‘I wish it were the case.’ She took a deep breath. ‘But it wasn’t.’
There was a moment of silence and then he hiccoughed. ‘Damn the drink. It’s really messed with my mind, and I’ve got too much going on right now to deal with a quarrelsome ghost – real or imagined… I’m sleeping this off in the boathouse.’
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘You do that. And don’t bother coming back. I thought you were here to help me but you’re making everything worse. How dare you open this all up again. How dare you say such unkind things.’
There was a squeak of the bed and the sound of footsteps retreating into the distance, as Olivia rolled onto her back and stared up at the ceiling, totally bewildered by the conversation she’d just had with the voice beyond the wall.
She’d been so certain he was either something her mind had conjured up or a spirit that had failed to move on to the afterlife.
But now she was not so sure.