I resisted rolling my eyes at Charles’ pomposity. Mal de mer? Why couldn’t he just say “seasickness”?
“However, gentlemen, we have a special guest joining us for lunch today,” Charles said. “This is Thomas Andrews, the Titanic’s designer.”
“Nice to meet you all,” Andrews said, as he extended his hand to each of us. His Irish brogue was refined, far more graceful than the gruff accents of the steerage men I’d encountered down below.
“So, Mr. Andrews, the papers described this ship as ‘unsinkable,’” Charles said. “How did you design a ship that can’t sink?”
“It’s quite simple, really,” Andrews said. “The hull of the ship is divided into sixteen watertight compartments that reach all the way up to E-Deck.”
Andrews moved his hands as he spoke, as if to help us visualize the bowels of the ship.
“In an emergency, the watertight doors will shut, either automatically when the water reaches a certain height, or electronically from the bridge,” he continued. “Titanic can stay afloat with any two compartments or all four of the first compartments flooded. Even if our worst nightmare—a head-on collision with another liner—came to pass, we’d be able to stay afloat two days, three at the most.”
“It certainly is a technological wonder,” Charles said. “But it makes me question why they still thought it necessary to outfit us with lifeboats for everyone aboard. It’s nonsensical to congest the deck space with those ugly wooden boats.”
“There’s enough for about half, actually,” Andrews replied. “Some argued for no lifeboats at all, but the law requires them. If there was an emergency, the women and children would be put into the boats, while the men await the rescue ship.”
Just then, I spotted Mr. Bowen, the steward, coming toward us.
“Yes, what is it?” Charles asked before he could even open his mouth.
“Your wife, sir,” Mr. Bowen said. “She’s quite ill and has requested your return to the stateroom.”
Charles clucked with annoyance. “But we just sat down!” he replied. “I think she can wait until lunch is over.”
“But…”
He turned back to our tablemates. “Sorry for the interruption, gentlemen,” he said, in a tone that conveyed his disdain for Mother and her silly complaints.
I pushed away my plate and rose from my seat. “I’ll go,” I said, without hesitation.
“John…” Charles began, but I ignored him.
* * *
Mother was lying in bed by the time I reached B-Deck. Celia stood over her, holding a dampened cloth to her forehead. Sadie wandered into the room, clutching her doll.
“Johnny, why is Mommy sick?” she asked.
“Mommy’s fine,” I replied. “She’s just tired.”
“No she’s not,” Sadie insisted. “She fell again.”
Mother moaned weakly.
“I’ve had enough of this,” I muttered under my breath. It was clear that Charles was wrong to drag Mother on this voyage against the doctor’s orders. He had such little regard for her that she was back at square one, confined to bed.
Just then, the door swung open abruptly.
“John, I need to talk to you,” Charles said. “Privately.”
“What is it?” I asked as I stepped into his stateroom. “To be frank, I’m more concerned with Mother right now.”
“That’s the nurse’s job,” Charles snapped. “We have to talk about tonight. I’ve thought it over, and I’ll give Bridget half the money.”
My mouth nearly fell open. After last night’s tirade, the last thing I expected was for Charles to budge even an inch. I wondered what could have changed his mind. Whatever information was in that document, it must be damning.
“But I want to see the letter first to verify its authenticity,” he continued. “If I’m satisfied, I’ll send Rathbone with the cash.”
“You know Jim and Bridget don’t trust you,” I replied. “I doubt they’ll hand over the letter first.”
“You’re mistakenly assuming they’re as bright as we,” Charles replied haughtily.
I pictured the small, dark-haired girl I’d met last night, and felt an unexpected flash of anger that Charles kept belittling her. It was a strange sensation. Why do I care what he says about her? I wondered. I don’t even know her, and besides, she hates me already.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll try to get the letter tonight. Provided I don’t get beat up again.”
* * *
When I returned to Mother’s stateroom, Celia ordered me out.
“John, keep Sadie busy for a while,” she said. “Your mother needs to rest.”
I took my sister’s hand. “Would you like to get some tea and scones?” I asked. I pointed to her doll. “Dolly can come too.”
Hesitantly, she nodded.
I led her to the Café Parisian on B-Deck, which was modeled after a French sidewalk café. It was filled with first class women sipping tea at sparkling white tables with red tablecloths. Sadie and I took a seat under a porthole, where the sun streamed in.
A café attendant came by to pour tea.
“Mommy’s sick,” Sadie said. “That means Daddy’s angry again.” Her nonchalant tone was chilling. At seven years old, she was becoming accustomed to this madness.
I set down my teacup and decided to see what else my sister knew.
“Sadie, how do you know Daddy’s mad?” I asked.
She held a scone up to the doll’s mouth, pretending to let it take a bite. “He yells a lot,” she replied. “And he told Mr. Rathbone that Mommy was going away soon.”
I wasn’t sure if I heard her right. “He said what?”
“He said she was going away soon,” Sadie repeated matter-of-factly.
My blood ran cold. No, no, I thought. Sadie had to be imagining things. Charles was arrogant, and a brute, but he couldn’t possibly go that far…could he?
“What does that mean, Johnny?” Sadie asked. “Is it my fault for being naughty? I know I’ve been bad, but I don’t want Mommy to leave me.”
I decided it was best to calm her fears, at least for now. The last thing Mother needed was another tantrum.
“Of course it’s not your fault,” I said. “He probably just meant we were going home soon. All of us.”
She shrugged.
“Okay,” she said. “I don’t like Daddy very much anymore.”
“Me neither,” I replied honestly.
Then she propped her doll in her lap and gazed up at me, her eyes dark and deadly serious. “Johnny, do you promise everything will be alright? I promise I won’t be bad anymore.”
I took her hand and forced myself to smile at her.
“Yes, Sadie. I promise.”
* * *
After dinner, when the other first class passengers had retreated to the lounge or the smoking room, I again took the elevator to E-Deck.
It was late enough that the stewards would bar the third class men from the women’s quarters. I hoped they’d already escorted the girls back to their cabins, said their good-byes and turned them in for the night.
“Slumming again?” the lift attendant asked. He took note of my bruises. “Didn’t turn out so well last time, did it?”
“Just take me down, please,” I replied.
I had the slip of paper with Bridget’s cabin number: F-28. I followed Scotland Road to the third class stairwell, which took me into the lower decks of the ship.
The hallways were mostly empty, but I could hear the faint echo of music coming from one of the decks above. The steerage passengers must have gathered in the lounge again. I made my way to F-Deck, where I counted down the cabin numbers.
F-22. F-24. F-26. This next one has to be hers.
All of a sudden I heard a man’s voice echoing in the stairwell behind me. I dodged into a nearby corridor and pressed myself against the wall, motionless. Please, please don’t let that be Jim, I pleaded silently.
The v
oice was trailed by a girl’s laughter.
“But I was winning!” she giggled. “You should’ve let me stay.”
“Not until you learn to hold your liquor,” the man responded, but his voice was pleasant. I heard a pair of keys enter the door lock as someone jiggled it open.
I peered around the corner. It was Bridget’s bunkmate, her cheeks flushed and her red bun disheveled. With her was the same redheaded boy who had hit me. Jim’s friend.
I pressed myself back against the wall.
“Goodnight, Mary,” the redhead said. “Stay out of trouble, ya hear?” I held my breath as his heavy boots pounded back up the stairwell.
A few seconds later, I heard a door open again.
“I saw you back there,” Mary’s voice called. “You don’t have to hide.”
I stepped back into the hallway and smiled self-consciously, embarrassed that she’d caught me.
“I wasn’t hiding,” I explained hurriedly. “It’s just that, you know, you had a man with you…”
“Patrick?” Mary interrupted. “He’s my brother. And you needn’t worry about him. He’s harmless, so long as you keep him away from the other boys…and the Jameson.”
She put her hands on her hips and studied me.
“So what’s going on here?” she asked. “Last night wasn’t a pretty sight. But here you are, back for more. You must have a good reason for it.”
“It’s a long story,” I replied. “Do you know where she is? I need to talk to her alone.”
“She’s in the smoking room with the boys,” Mary said. “They’ve got a horse race going on. I was winning until Patrick turned me in for the night. Do you know the game, horse racing?”
I shook my head.
“Figures,” Mary said, noting my neat grooming and expensive clothes. “Well, she’ll be back here soon, but I can’t promise Jim won’t be with her.”
“Thanks, Mary,” I said. And with that, she went back into the small cabin she shared with Bridget.
There was no chance I was going to the smoking room, which was surely filled with drunk Irishmen willing to fight me. Instead, I waited. Groups of women came and went, some escorted by men. Others were hand-in-hand with children. I gathered that most of the steerage passengers were Irish or Scandinavian—Swedish, maybe. They called back and forth to one another in their singsong language. None noticed me.
Finally, I heard a girl humming to herself softly as she approached. I hesitated, listening for a man’s boots pounding on the steps behind her. There were none.
Bridget halted in her tracks when she saw me. “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “How’d you find my cabin?”
“I need the letter,” I said, ignoring her questions.
“I don’t have it,” she replied, inching towards her door. “Please, just leave me alone.”
“Then why did you demand five thousand from Charles?”
“Don’t ask me,” she said. “It was Jim’s idea to steal the letter, after I told him what it said. He has it.”
“In his cabin?” I asked, trying to stall her until she relaxed.
Suddenly a voice called out from the top of the stairwell. “Bridget? Is that you?”
“Oh, no,” Bridget breathed. “My brother’s coming!”
“Are you down there, Bridget?” Jim called again.
She grabbed my sleeve. “This way!” she said. She guided me through the maze of steerage hallways with ease.
“Up these stairs,” Bridget said. “We’ll go outside.”
We climbed the stairwell to the third class promenade, where a few steerage passengers gathered in the cold, smoking and taking in the ocean air. I scanned their faces to see if the Irish boys had followed us, but they were nowhere in sight.
“That was close,” Bridget said, heaving a deep sigh of relief.
“I take it your brother doesn’t like me much,” I said. “He left me with a nasty bump last night.”
Bridget laughed. “It’s your father he doesn’t like much,” she admitted.
She looked up at me. “I used to dust your family portraits in the house,” she said. “When I saw you in the lounge, I knew you must be his son.”
I didn’t bother to correct her. If he talked about me at all, Charles must not have mentioned that I was really his stepson.
“Charles wants to make a deal for the letter,” I said. “But first, I have to know what it says. Why did Jim want to steal it?”
“I can’t tell you,” she replied stubbornly.
“Bridget, please,” I said. “Charles won’t tell me himself. I can’t imagine what trouble he’s in, but I had nothing to do with it. I’m his heir. Whatever that letter says, it will fall on my shoulders someday.”
She paused for a moment.
“I didn’t mean to see it,” she finally said. “But sometimes Mrs. Conkling asked me to open the mail. It was a letter from the engineers up at the mill. Mr. Conkling’s company has been making bad steel. High in sulfur, it said. And they put it in the Titanic!”
“The shipyards don’t know the steel is no good,” she said. “It’d be a scandal if anyone knew.”
The huckster! That’s what Charles was hiding. He’d been selling cheap steel to the shipyards for a hefty profit, knowing it was junk. And now he was trying to cover his tracks.
“It could put Lake Erie Steel out of business, that’s for certain,” I said. “How did you end up working for Charles, anyway?”
“Jim was looking for factory work in London last fall,” Bridget said. “So I went there to join him after my mama died. A girl I met, another Irish girl, worked for a family friend of the Conkling’s. They hired me to take care of Sadie and do the domestic work. The Conklings, I thought they were so kind…”
Bridget’s voice trailed off, and she looked down at her boots for a moment.
“…Anyway, like I said, it was Jim’s idea to bribe Mr. Conkling,” she continued. “I told him what the letter said, since he can’t read. Jim told me to write a note saying we’d give it to the papers. I put it on his desk, and then I took off for good.”
“We need the money, of course,” Bridget said. “But above all, I think Jim wants to punish Mr. Conkling.”
“For what?” I asked.
She shuddered and shook her head, as if to erase the thought. Then she looked at me defiantly.
“Jim says I’m not to trust you,” she said.
“Fair enough.” I sensed that I couldn’t get anywhere by arguing with her.
We stayed silent for a minute, staring out into the water.
“It’s hard to believe you’re a Conkling,” Bridget finally said.
“Why is that?”
“I just don’t see much of Mr. Conkling in you,” Bridget said, studying my face.
I opened my mouth to explain that Charles wasn’t my father—that my real father passed away years ago. I was cut off by an angry voice.
“You!”
I spun around to find Jim stalking toward me. The two boys who’d been there last night followed close behind.
I put my hands up to show I wasn’t looking for a fight. “Please,” I said. “We’re just working out a deal.”
“Shut up, you ninny.”
And with that Jim flung me into the railing. As my head crashed against the iron, he hit me again.
“Get him, boys!”
Bridget screamed. The redhead tried to drag me back onto my feet, no doubt so he could knock me down again.
“Where’s the money?” Jim shouted.
“I don’t have it yet!”
“Then you tell that dirty old man to cough it up or I’ll—”
Suddenly another voice interrupted, calm but forceful.
“Jim! Stop that right now! Right. Now!”
It was a man dressed in a long black robe with a white collar. A cross hung around his neck.
“Sorry, Father Byles,” Jim grumbled. He let go of my clothes and let me sink back to the groun
d.
“What are the three of you doing beating up on this one young lad? What did I tell you about the fighting?” the priest demanded, but his voice wasn’t angry. He reached out and helped me up.
“Jim, you reek of whiskey,” he said. “Hitting the bottle for the third night running, aye?”
The boys stared at their feet in shame.
“Go back to your cabins,” Father Byles said. “Take Barry and Patrick with you. No more liquor tonight.”
“Yes, Father.” The boys quietly retreated toward the staircase. After he watched them go, the priest retreated, too.
“Good night, Bridget,” he said, and shot me a look. “Be more careful from now on.”
Bridget turned back to me and shook her head.
“He’s the only man on the ship the boys will listen to,” she explained. “He warned Jim about the fighting. Our first night on board, the master-at-arms had him in handcuffs. He got drunk and took a swing at a boy who got too close to me in the lounge.”
She laughed, but I changed the subject. I was subconsciously aware of the time. Charles would be waiting for me by now, and I couldn’t afford to make him suspicious.
“Listen, Bridget, I have to get that letter,” I said. “I didn’t sell the bad steel. But if Lake Erie goes under, I’m ruined, too. Charles wants to see it before he gives you the money. Can you get it from Jim?”
The wind was bitterly cold. Bridget lifted the shawl from around her shoulders and draped it around her hair, shivering.
“I know my brother won’t give it up without seeing the money first,” she said. “If I could, I would.”
I could tell by the look on her face that she meant it. The deck lights shone on her face, illuminating the glints of red in her hair and the green in her eyes.
“What if I bring the money?” I asked. “Can we meet again tomorrow?”
She nodded. “I’ll tell Jim.”
“I can send you a message through the stewards,” I said. “I’ll give you a time and a place to meet. You can bring your brother if you’d like, but tell him I’ll have the money.”
“We can’t go into first class,” she reminded me. “It’s the law aboard ships. The English think we’re all crawling with disease.” She wrinkled her nose in disgust.
“I can come back down to steerage,” I offered. “First class passengers do it all the time.”
Bridget looked me over.
“Yeah, and they stand out like a sore thumb,” she retorted. “If you don’t want to call attention to yourself, you’ll not want to come looking like this again.” She pointed to my neatly pressed clothes, which I’d worn to dinner in first class. “Come with me.”