My hands were shaking. I set down Jen’s phone, and then I set down the wineglass next to it. Without a coaster.
“You mean a pirate site,” I said.
“Oh God, no! I would never. It’s an online library.”
“That’s what they call it. But they’re just stealing. They’re fencing stolen goods. Easy to do with electronic copies.”
“No. That’s not true.” Mimi’s voice rose a little. Sharpened a little. “Libraries lend out e-books.”
“Real libraries do. They buy them from the publisher. Sites like Bingo just upload unauthorized copies to sell advertising or put cookies on your phone or whatever else. They’re pirates.”
There was a small, shrill silence. I lifted my wineglass and took a long drink, even though my fingers were trembling so badly, I knew everyone could see the vibration.
“Well,” said Mimi. “It’s not like it matters. I mean, the book’s been out for years and everything, it’s like public domain.”
I put down the wineglass and picked up my tote bag. “So I don’t have time to lecture you about copyright law or anything. Basically, if publishers don’t get paid, authors don’t get paid. That’s kind of how it works.”
“Oh, come on,” said Mimi. “You got paid for this book.”
“Not as much as you think. Definitely not as much as your husband gets paid to short derivatives or whatever he does that buys all this stuff.” I waved my hand at the walls. “And you know, fine, maybe it’s not the big sellers who suffer. It’s the midlist authors, the great names you never hear of, where every sale counts. . . . What am I saying? You don’t care. None of you actually cares. Sitting here in your palaces in the sky. You never had to earn a penny of your own. Why the hell should you care about royalties?” I climbed out of my silver chair and hoisted my tote bag over my shoulder. “It’s about a dollar a book, by the way. Paid out every six months. So I walked all the way over here, gave up an evening of my life, and even if every single one of you had actually bought a legitimate copy, I would have earned about a dozen bucks for my trouble. Twelve dollars and a glass of cheap wine. I’ll see myself out.”
I turned and marched back across the living room, tripping on the last chair leg. Angel stood frozen in awe, holding a tray of two-bite cupcakes and a chilled bottle of Pinot Gris. My armpits dripped; my heart thudded so hard I felt dizzy. As I opened the door, I heard somebody’s voice carry down the gallery.
“What a bitch!”
I considered holding up my middle finger. But I didn’t. My mom would have been proud, if she were still lucid enough to understand.
* * *
I took the crosstown bus back home and made some mac and cheese from the box. Told myself that was okay because it was organic boxed mac and cheese. Told myself that at least they hadn’t gotten around to asking me what I was working on for my next book. Plopped on the sofa and toed off my wedges and picked up the remote. I had a few shows queued up on the DVR. Some history, some true crime. I told myself I’d be working, actually, because you never knew where your next book idea might come from. You never knew when inspiration might strike.
Oh, the things you tell yourself.
I switched on the TV and picked up my bowl of mac and cheese. From across the room, inside my tote bag, my phone started ringing. An outraged Mimi, probably. If I were lucky, she’d call Page Six or something. No such thing as bad publicity, right? Some intern would contact me to ask for details. Small Potatoes author Sarah Blake melts down at Park Avenue book club . . . Sarah, whatever happened to all that movie talk around Small Potatoes . . . ? Sarah, what are you working on now . . . ?
A year after Small Potatoes came out, my editor took me to lunch and asked about my ideas. I said I was thinking about Queen Victoria’s children. She frowned and said what about a racehorse, like Seabiscuit or Secretariat, only another one, obviously. She was sure there were more famous racehorses out there. I said I’d look into it. Then she called up six months later and said she wanted me to write the next Boys on the Boat, maybe like an America’s Cup team made up of hardscrabble youths from Minnesota. Then it was World War Two. World War Two was red-hot. Some scrappy bilingual girl working for the French Resistance. Or what about Coco Chanel? The Lindbergh baby? I said I thought those were all pretty well covered already. I wanted something new. I said the story would find me when it was ready.
She hadn’t called since. My agent stopped replying to my emails personally. The foreign translation deals dried up. The movie people didn’t pick up the option after all. The royalty checks shrank and shrank.
Don’t get me wrong. There was a lot of money that first year, or at least a lot of money by the standard of what I was used to: daughter of a divorced mother and an absentee father, grad student living on financial aid and ramen noodles. But I spent it all. I had to. Not on myself. Well, not most of it.
The phone rang again. I thought, Maybe it’s not Mimi or Page Six. Maybe it’s Mom.
The images on the screen shifted and flashed. I couldn’t even remember what I was watching. I set aside the mac and cheese and rose to fetch my tote from the hall stand. My feet ached. Even my favorite wedges had their limits. My legs ached, my head ached. I rummaged in the tote and drew out my phone, just as the call went to voice mail.
Not Mom. The care home. They’d already left two messages.
I didn’t bother listening. I just swiped the notification and pressed redial.
For the past four years, Mom had been living a few blocks away—hence my tiny studio here on Riverside Drive, which was not my natural habitat—in a small, private care home for Alzheimer’s patients. She started showing symptoms when she was only fifty-six, and it progressed pretty quickly from there. I won’t bore you with the details. Long story short, I moved her into Riverside Haven about the time Small Potatoes went from hardcover into trade paperback, and sold the adorable Carnegie Hill one-bedroom I’d bought a year earlier in order to fund her care. The place had dedicated therapists for each patient, private rooms, views of the river. Nothing was too good for my mother, who raised me by herself after Dad split when I was four. Sure, it was expensive, but I figured I’d just write another book, right? Another blockbuster work of narrative nonfiction. No problem.
“Riverside Haven, can you hold, please?”
“No, wait—”
The hold music started. I sank back on the sofa and stared at the mac and cheese, which had begun to congeal. Turned my head toward the hall closet instead. The door. The doorknob. What lay behind it, singing like a siren. A siren I’d done my best to ignore for four long years.
“Riverside Haven, can I help you?”
“Hi! It’s Sarah Blake. You were trying to reach me? Is Mom okay?”
“Oh, hello, Miss Blake. Diana Carr here. No, your mother’s just fine. She’s had a quiet day. I didn’t mean to scare you. I just wanted to speak to you about last month’s invoice.”
* * *
When I finished speaking to Diana Carr—yes, I understood how many months in arrears I was, I understood that Riverside Haven would do its best not to have to resort to eviction—I set my phone down next to the bowl of congealed macaroni and went to the hall closet. Opened the door and rose on my toes. Found the small wooden trunk and dragged it from the shelf. The smell of dust filled my head, dustiness and mustiness and old wood, and above it all a slight hint of Youth Dew, even though I had removed this chest from my mother’s apartment four years ago. I placed it carefully on the coffee table, squaring the edges, and sat on my knees and stared at the lid.
Annie Houlihan
593 Lorimer Street
Brooklyn, New York
I had opened this chest once before, when I was about ten or eleven. My mother found me in her closet, lifting out the contents, and that was the only time in my life she ever screamed at me. Slammed down the lid and sent me to my room. When she was calm again, she took me to the sofa and tucked me under her warm, soft arm. That was your great-grandmothe
r’s chest, she said. With all your great-grandfather’s things in it. All they found on him when they pulled his body out of the water. The Cunard company sent it back to her in a parcel, and she wouldn’t even look at it. She had your grandmother pack everything into a chest and promise never to open it. She said it was his tomb. So you are never to open that chest again, do you hear me? Never again.
I’d obeyed my mother, because what else could I do? I knew the story of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather, how they left Ireland together in search of a new life, how my great-grandfather Patrick had worked as a steward for the Cunard Line while my great-grandmother Annie raised five children in a small upstairs apartment in Brooklyn, saving up to buy a house of their own.
But I also knew what lay in that chest. I’d seen it with my own eyes, before Mom slammed down the lid. And my curious brain never could let it go. Never could erase that knowledge from my head, or banish the questions those objects raised. Because, my God, what a story they told.
And I was just born that way. Mom said so herself.
So maybe Mom would forgive me for what I was about to do. Maybe she would shake her head and understand, because I was Sarah, her daughter, and I was born to wonder and to dig for answers. Maybe she and my grandmother and my great-grandmother would absolve me for breaking my word, because I was at the end of the road, nowhere else to go, and I wasn’t doing it for myself, not entirely. I was doing it for Mom. I was doing it for that invoice lying in the drawer of my bedside table. For the voice in my head that said, This is the story, the story that wants to find you. No other story.
I lifted the lid.
The hinges creaked. The smell of brine filled the air. Brine and wool and wood. I closed my eyes and breathed it in, and then I reached inside with two hands and pulled out the little bundle.
Just a few things. All that remained on his body when they pulled him from the sea, ninety-nine years ago. His white steward’s uniform, stained dark at the collar and the right arm, so stiff it crackled under my fingertips. An oilskin pouch, containing an envelope with Mr. Robert Langford, Stateroom B-38 typed on the back, and a series of numbers and letters written in black ink along the other side.
A few coins, minted by the United States Treasury in the early years of the century.
A silver pocket watch, slightly tarnished at the seams.
And a first-class luncheon menu from RMS Lusitania, dated Thursday, the sixth of May, 1915, on the back of which was scribbled the following message, the ink smeared with moisture and barely legible.
No more betrayals. Meet me B-deck prom starboard side.
Chapter 2
Caroline
New York City
Friday, April 30, 1915
Caroline Telfair Hochstetter stood at her opened bedroom window facing Fifth Avenue, the cool breeze attempting to rip the curtains out of her tightly clutched fists. She was freezing—as usual—but the feeling of claustrophobia, never far away, had latched on to her with clawlike fingers from the moment her maid, Jones, had awakened her with the breakfast tray and a reminder that they needed to finish packing for their departure to England the following day.
Once more, she breathed in a lungful of air hoping, just once, that she could pretend she was back home in Savannah, with the dulcet tones and dropped consonants of her fellow natives falling softly on her ears, and a breeze carrying the beloved scent of the salt marshes that surrounded the city brushing her skin and lifting her hair like a mother’s hand. Instead she coughed on the fumes from the congestion of motor-cars and buses below, feeling so far from home that she could have been on the moon and not seen her surroundings as more alien.
“Ma’am?”
Caroline glanced over her shoulder to see her new maid, Martha Jones, standing at the dressing room door, balancing a tray holding a crystal glass and a decanter of claret.
Jones was a recent hire following the rather quick departure of Caroline’s previous lady’s maid, whose only reason for leaving had been that her circumstances had changed for the better. Happily, Caroline had not been without a maid for long. Jones had been the first to appear on her doorstep as soon as the employment advertisement had appeared in the paper. She’d come with an impressive list of references and talents, including a self-professed genius with a hair tong, and Caroline had immediately hired her without interviewing any other candidate. She’d no time to waste, after all, as her trip across the Atlantic was to commence the following week. Caroline had told herself she’d been lucky, and had quickly brushed aside any reservations she might have had about her new lady’s maid.
“I beg your pardon, ma’am. My last mistress was a society hostess in San Francisco and always asked for a glass or two of claret while I dressed her hair before a party. I hope you don’t mind me being so forward.” She placed the tray on the dressing table, making room amid the hairpins and brushes.
Caroline smiled gratefully, closing the window. “I do believe you’re a lifesaver, Jones.” She sat down and allowed the maid to pour her a generous glass of claret before taking a long sip. “Yes, a definite lifesaver.”
Jones smiled, their eyes meeting in the mirror. “Just doing my job, ma’am. Now, let’s see to your hair. Unless you have a preference, I had an idea for an evening style I saw in the American Vogue last month that I believe would look simply stunning on you—not that you need any enhancements, that’s for sure.”
Caroline looked at the maid’s reflection, wondering if Jones was trying to ingratiate herself to her new employer of if she really was the consummate lady’s maid, always equipped with the right tools and the right flattery. Jones smiled benignly, her rather plain face and doughy figure emanating a no-nonsense aura of confidence and ability.
Feeling magnanimous after another long sip of her claret, Caroline said, “You’re the expert, Jones. Why don’t you have fun with it?” She stared at her reflection as her maid deftly unbraided the large plait that lay over her shoulder, allowing the thick, dark brown waves to cascade down her back. The color matched her eyes, and Caroline smiled to herself, recalling how her mother had said she’d wanted to name her Susan, like the black-eyed Susans that grew in the pine forests near their Savannah home. But her father had insisted on the name Caroline and, as in all things concerning her father, her mother had capitulated.
The room was silent as Caroline’s hair was deftly coaxed into curls and rolls that nature had never intended. Only the ever-present noise of the busy street outside and the sound of scurrying servants intruded, even these getting quieter and quieter as Caroline sipped her wine, her thoughts twisting and turning along well-worn paths.
She hadn’t wanted to have this party, a great extravagant affair orchestrated by her husband, Gilbert, who thought this would be a marvelous opportunity for all of the first-class passengers embarking the following day on Cunard’s great liner Lusitania to get better acquainted.
Her fingers tightened on the stem of her glass. Caroline was well aware that the party was just another excuse for Gilbert to show off his wealth in the face of old money, as if his generosity and benevolence could ever erase the fact that his money was crisp and shiny, having been earned by Gilbert himself from the steel mills of Gilbert’s home state of Pennsylvania.
She wanted to tell him that there was no need for him to prove himself to these people, that their opinions didn’t matter. That what did matter was that she loved him because of who he was. Not because he was the founder and president of Hochstetter Iron & Steel, but because he’d known poverty and through hard work, brains, and persistence had become the man she’d fallen in love with. Yet that had been the subject of their first fight. The first of many in their four-year marriage.
A knock sounded on the dressing room door just as Jones put down the comb and hair tongs. “Come in,” Caroline called out.
Gilbert stepped into the room, immediately dwarfing it. He was taller than most men, his shoulders broader and filling out his expertly tailored dinne
r jacket in a way that made Caroline want to run her hands down his arms to absorb some of their strength. Because she needed it now. The wine had given her the courage to try one last time. “Please leave us for a moment, Jones. Just ten minutes and then you can help me into my gown.”
The maid bowed her head before leaving, quietly shutting the door behind her so that Caroline barely heard it latch.
Caroline met Gilbert’s bright blue eyes with her own, the wine doing nothing to calm the tightening in her chest as she regarded him. His blond hair had been combed back and oiled, making him look years younger—perhaps in an effort to make him appear closer to Caroline’s own age of twenty-four. His hands were held stiffly behind his back as he smiled awkwardly at her, unsure of what he should say.
Taking advantage of the situation, Caroline spoke first. “I beg of you, Gilbert. Please. Let’s not go to England now. It’s not safe to cross the Atlantic. You know this—we have both been reading the papers. So many ships have been sunk by German U-boats. And not just cargo ships, but passenger ships, too. The Germans don’t seem to care as long as they torpedo something.”
He didn’t move. “We’ve already been through this, Caroline. Not going is not an option. I’ve already made an appointment with an antiquities dealer in London and he is expecting us.”
Caroline stood, grateful for the wine that seemed to be working as a barrier between her anger and her voice. “But why now? Are you so desperate for money that you must sell something so precious to me? I had to read in the paper that your government contracts to make barbwire were a boon to your business, but other than that I’m in the dark about our finances. You tell me nothing of your business affairs so I don’t know how desperate you might be. Maybe if you confide in me . . .”
“No. I will not burden you with my business affairs. When I married you, I promised your mother that I would keep you in the manner to which you deserve. I will never go back on that promise.”