“Bridget!” I shouted, and reached for her, nearly flipping the boat upright. There was a gash above her left eyebrow. Blood was trickling down her face and lifebelt.
“Leave her!” a crewman barked. “She won’t make it to morning. There’s no room for the half-dead on here.”
“For God’s sake, she’s a girl!” someone else responded. “Now be a man and help her aboard.”
Bridget flopped onto the boat, face-down. I knelt down, being careful not to rock the boat, and propped her up in my lap. We both shivered uncontrollably.
“Bridget,” I said, shaking her. “Are you alright?”
She didn’t respond.
“Bridget, please answer me.”
“I was washed overboard with Father Byles,” she said through chattering teeth. “And I hit my head against something…” She tried to raise her hand to her forehead, but was too frozen to feel it. “Something hard.”
The Titanic’s stern was standing at a steep angle, the propellers pointing at the heavens. It hovered there a minute, then began a steady plunge. A few clumps of desperate people still clung to the rails.
My mind flashed to all the magnificent sights on the ship. The Grand Staircase…the Café Parisien…the oak carvings and gold statues, gone.
I couldn’t bear to even think about the hundreds of people who were going down with it.
I felt numb as I watched the propellers disappear below the surface of the ocean, and not just from the cold. No one aboard our overturned boat breathed a word. I turned Bridget’s face away so she wouldn’t have to see it.
After minutes of stunned silence, Lightoller said, “She’s gone.”
The wrenching sounds from within the ship were no longer drowning out the blood-chilling din of the people in the water. In every direction, there were flailing figures—wailing, praying, gasping, but still very much alive.
Lightoller bit his lip. I could see that the senior officer felt partly responsible for the horror around us, yet powerless to stop it.
“Well, don’t just sit there!” he snapped. “Pull some of these people aboard as fast as you can.”
We pulled aboard every frantic swimmer who managed to paddle to us, limbs nearly immobilized by the hypothermia. The upside-down collapsible was supporting a ragtag mix of crew, first class men, and steerage passengers. After twenty minutes, two of them were dead from the cold. The drunken fireman gently nudged them off the hull of the boat, letting them float away to make room for others.
“Do you see any more alive?” Lightoller asked.
“No, sir,” another crewman responded, “none that we can reach. They’re dying quickly.”
“We have no oars,” Lightoller lamented. “No oars and no light.”
The overturned collapsible drifted aimlessly among the Titanic’s debris. I could spot the green lanterns from the other lifeboats off in the distance. I wondered if they’d ever realize we were stranded here.
If not, we were doomed.
“My brother,” Bridget whispered. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”
Silver light from the stars illuminated the wreckage around us. The wails of the swimmers were dying down; most of them bobbed up and down in their lifebelts, motionless. I didn’t dare tell her that I had seen Jim vanish underwater.
“They’re all dead,” Bridget continued. “Jim, and the boys, and the new friends we made, all hoping for a new life…” As I held her head in my lap, cold tears trickled down her face. She was still bleeding from the forehead.
“Don’t say that,” I said. “You can’t give up now, Bridget. We’ll be rescued in no time.”
“It’s true,” a weak voice said. I turned to find Harold Bride, the wireless operator, clinging to the boat, his feet dangling over the sides. “There’s another ship coming for us.”
“How do you know?”
“I am—was—one of the wireless operators aboard,” Bride said. “We started putting out the distress call at midnight. Several ships responded, they just didn’t make it in time.”
“There’s another ship nearby,” Harold Bride said, “maybe ten miles off. If you look over there, you can see her lights.”
He was right. If I squinted hard enough, I could see the faint yellow lights of a steamer that was stopped somewhere in the distance.
“It’s the Californian,” Bride said. “We couldn’t reach her over wireless.”
Officer Lightoller looked ready to explode. “Why the hell not?” he demanded.
“Her operators kept sending us ice warnings today, over and over again,” Bride said. “Finally, my partner wired back, ‘Shut up, I’m busy.’ Then the Californian went silent. I would guess that the operator is in bed for the night. A Cunard Line steamer will be here at four.”
I dug out my watch. It was stopped at a little past two in the morning, when I went into the water. We still had at least another hour to wait—another agonizing hour of trying to keep the collapsible upright, of trying to keep Bridget awake. I held my finger under her nostrils to make sure she was still breathing.
“Keep talking to her,” Lightoller ordered me. “Keep her conscious until the rescue ship arrives.” Bridget looked disoriented, staring blankly up at the sky. I wasn’t sure what to say to her.
“I shouldn’t have given my shawl to your friend,” she said before I could speak.
“You mean Rudy? Why not?”
“It was all I had left of my mama,” Bridget replied quietly. “She made it for me. I knew it was getting ragged, but I couldn’t bear to part with it. Now I have nothing. Nothing and no one.”
I wasn’t sure how to respond. If she lost hope now, she wouldn’t survive til morning. A few more of the men—tough, sturdy crewmen—had succumbed to the cold and slipped off the boat.
“You have me,” I said.
“You don’t know me,” Bridget replied, with more a tone of hopelessness than anger. “You don’t even know my name, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
The wind was beginning to pick up ever so slightly, and I started to comprehend just how cold I was. My clothes were soaked through, and the only body part that wasn’t numb was my icy, stinging face. I could feel the disorientation setting in. The others must have felt it, too, because no one spoke.
Finally, Bridget said, “Burke.”
“What?”
“That’s my name,” she replied. “If you make it and I don’t, remember it. Tell anyone who asks that I held on as long as I could. And that I confessed my sins to Father Byles before we sank.”
“Bridget Burke,” I repeated to myself. “I’ll remember.”
“The Burkes were one of the tribes of Galway,” Bridget said. She was rambling now, sounding like she was someplace far away. “They were a noble family, back when it mattered. All of Ireland is poor now.”
“I was born in a place called Connemara,” she said. “In a little house by the sea. It is the most beautiful place in all of Ireland…you’ll never see anyplace so green. My daddy used to tell me I had eyes the color of Connemara stone.”
I thought of how brightly Bridget’s eyes had shone under the Titanic’s deck lights. I could still see them in the semi-darkness, even as the rest of her face turned cold and grey.
“Then he died young, like most Irish men do,” she said. “That was when we went to the big city. It was brown and ugly there, but at least my mama could work. She was a sewing girl. She always hoped I’d be something better. But I’m not, am I?” She was starting to tear up again.
“No,” I replied. “That’s not true. You’ll have a new life now. You’ll never have to be somebody’s maid again.”
Bridget snorted. “That’s easy to say when you’re a Conkling.”
“I told you that I’m not,” I said. “I was born John Merriman. My father was a professor at Oberlin. It was my mother who came from money, but he taught me there was more to value in life.”
I took a deep breath, trying to stay awake. “Then a fever
swept through the campus one spring, and he was gone. Mother’s insurance plan was to marry Charles two years later. I’m sure she thought she was doing right by me,” I said. “She had no idea what she was getting into.”
“Sometimes, I still hear my father’s voice in my head, guiding me toward the right thing to do. And it’s never what Charles wants.”
“Do you think Mr. Conkling made it?” Bridget asked. “The lifeboats were supposed to be for the women and babes.”
“I don’t know,” I replied. But silently, I remembered his declaration: As you might have guessed, I have a backup plan.
If any man could connive his way off the ship, it was Charles. At least the thought of seeing him again was enough to heat my blood.
“John,” Bridget said, trying to reach into her pocket with numb, swollen fingers. “I still have this.”
She handed me the necklace.
My vision was going blurry. Somewhere on the horizon, I thought I saw lights. Was it the same lights Bride had pointed out? I was too dazed to tell. I thought I heard a whistle blowing in the distance, and maybe a voice shouting. Then, silence. I dismissed it as a hypothermia-induced delusion.
“Hey, keep that girl awake!” Lightoller ordered me again.
I looked down at Bridget, whose eyes were half-open. She wasn’t shivering anymore. She started to sing to herself, a slow, sad Irish song.
“Oh Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling…from glen to glen, and down the mountainside…”
“No, Bridget,” I said, trying to shake her back to alertness. “There’s a ship coming. I can see it over there. Bridget…”
But before I could wake her, I felt myself slipping from consciousness, just as the lights from the approaching ship came into view.
* * *
I woke up somewhere dry and warm, blankets heaped on top of my chest. My vision was still blurry.
“Where am I?” I said aloud. For a second I was sure I had died and gone to heaven.
Then, the first voice I ever knew said, “Rest, John.”
It was Mother.
“Do you remember being rescued?” she asked.
I rubbed my eyes. “No, I don’t.”
“Officer Lowe’s boat took you on in the morning. We’re onboard the Carpathia now,” Mother said. “Fifteen hundred people, gone! Only seven hundred made it into the boats.”
“Mommy, is Johnny alright?” a little voice asked.
“Yes, Sadie, he’s going to be fine,” Mother said, with a strength in her voice I hadn’t heard in years. “We’re all going to be fine. We’ll be home in a few days.”
My heart sank as I pieced together fragmented memories from the night before. “What about Bridget?” I asked, my chest filling up with dread.
Mother’s face sagged. “I don’t know, John,” she said. “If she was rescued, she’d be downstairs with the other steerage passengers. They’ve turned the dining room into a makeshift hospital.”
“What do you mean, if she was rescued?” I cried. “She was with me all night!”
“John…”
I thought of the lifeless crewmen who had been nudged off our boat, left to drift out to sea. If that had happened to Bridget…
“I’ll be back,” I said, as I threw on the clothes that were laid out for me. Wherever she was, I had to find her.
* * *
The Carpathia’s dining room was cramped with cots. Steerage passengers from the Titanic milled about, some looking relieved, others looking lost. Some hunched in the corners and wept in silence.
I spotted Mary perched on the foot of a cot and rushed to her.
“Not now, John,” she said, pressing her finger to her lips. “She needs to rest.”
Bridget was lying on her back with her eyes closed, her dark hair fanned out on the pillow. The gash on her forehead was bandaged.
“Jim didn’t make it,” Bridget whispered miserably.
“He is with God now,” Mary replied, refusing to cry. “All the boys are.”
“And I’m alone,” Bridget said. “Where do I go now?”
Just then, a man in a Cunard uniform approached me.
“I beg your pardon, sir, but are you John Conkling?” he asked.
“Yes, that’s me.”
“First of all, my condolences for your father’s demise,” he said.
“What?” I exclaimed. “How do you know?”
“We pulled his body aboard today, sir,” the man said. “There were several personal effects in his pockets.”
I was too stunned to respond.
“I’m so sorry,” he stammered. “I assumed you’d already heard the news.”
“It’s quite alright,” I replied.
He produced a piece of paper from his pocket. “Anyway, sir, we received a telegram from his assistant in Cleveland. He said that as his heir, you alone can claim the items found with the body.”
Charles didn’t have time to cut me out of his will after all. Overnight, I had inherited his steel fortune. It was mine now, and I could do what I wished with it—for good or for evil.
Although Charles surely wouldn’t approve, I made a vow to choose good.
“Bridget,” I said, “I know where you can go.”
She opened her eyes. “Where?”
“You can go to Cleveland with me,” I said. “I live in a big house, not far from the lakeshore…”
“I’m sure Mrs. Conkling already has a maid,” Bridget interrupted, still looking despondent. “She has no use for me.”
“I don’t want you as a maid.”
She gazed up at me. Her eyes were red and tear-stained, but slowly, they showed a glint of a smile.
“Tell me about the big house,” she said, closing her eyes again. “I want to imagine what it will be like before I get there.”
I talked about Euclid Avenue and the flower garden and the beach in the summertime. I talked about Oberlin, and how she could take the carriage to visit me. I talked all night about what our new life together would be like, until Bridget at last drifted off to sleep…on a quiet sea of dreams.
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