When Elsie accompanied Princess Mary and her much older husband, Viscount Lascelles, to the Ranchi departure, her challenge began. Eager to show Mary the rooms, she was thrilled when the princess threw her arms around her neck.
“It’s so perfect,” she cried, walking into the green-and-gold-silk boudoir. “I’m not coming out until we get to Egypt! Thank you so much, Elsie. It’s remarkable.”
“I’m so glad you like it,” Elsie said, beaming. “I am really so glad!”
“Now, please say you will make it to Egypt to tour the pyramids with us,” Princess Mary said, taking both of Elsie’s hands. “It will be dreadfully hot and I will require your good humor. We’ll be in Cairo first, then Luxor, then the Sudan. I expect to meet Lord and Lady Inchcape in Cairo, but I can spirit you away for a week or so, can’t I? I say we make some fun out of it! Agreed?”
“Agreed!” Elsie said cheerfully.
“Now, please tell me there are at least two doors between the Viscount’s chambers and mine,” Princess Mary whispered with a giggle.
“Three, as a matter of fact,” Elsie replied, then winked.
She was still soaring from the princess’ reaction to her rooms when she arrived back at Victoria Station and suddenly there was a crowd around her. She tried to push through, but the crowd moved with her. In an awful moment she heard her name called.
“Miss Mackay!” the voice yelled sternly, almost forcing her to pay attention to it. “Daily Express. Captain Hinchliffe’s American agent, Jack Gillespie, just confirmed that Captain Hinchliffe will be embarking on a transatlantic attempt this week and that you will also be on board. Can you comment?”
Elsie was stunned, but there was no time to show it. She needed an answer and she needed it now. They had practiced this, but even she was surprised with the ease and confidence in which her reply was delivered.
“That is entirely incorrect,” she said as she stopped and broadcast her voice loudly. “I have been flying with him at Cranwell because I have a financial interest in his flight. He is going to cross the Atlantic, but not until after a nonstop flight to India.”
“So the American agent has his facts wrong,” another reporter asked. “Or do you? Reports are that only you have been participating in test flights, and not Sinclair.”
“It is quite true that I have been up in every test flight of the machine, including long endurance flights,” Elsie stated. “I am very annoyed at the whole matter. I have only a very small financial interest in the project, which is to attempt to establish a new record for long flight. As a matter of fact, Captain Hinchliffe is not certain where he is going.”
Elsie wasted no time getting back to Seamore Place, picking up the phone, and informing the editor of the Daily Express and setting the record quite straight.
“Let’s understand each other perfectly,” she said in a calm, steady, but imposing voice. “Should you run the misinformation that your reporter has carelessly raked up, I will sue your newspaper, I will win, I will become your boss, and I will shutter you. Do you understand? I suggest you be much more careful in the future.”
* * *
The next day, before a very strategically planned shopping trip with Sophie for her staged Egypt voyage, Elsie closely scanned the pages, but nothing about the flight or the ambush at Victoria Station had been printed. She paid the premium for Captain Hinchliffe’s life insurance and put the receipt in her pocketbook.
Nothing stopped the reporters from finding different avenues. Like ants, if one roadblock emerged, they’d scurry under it or bridge a new route. Quickly they found Emilie Hinchliffe walking near the hotel, Joan holding her hand, Pamela in the pram.
Emilie laughed at all of the fuss as two men with notebooks blocked her path.
“Miss Mackay will not go with him,” she told them with her kind, motherly smile. “He will take Gordon Sinclair, a former Royal Air Force pilot, on the India flight, and his companion across the Atlantic is still undecided. Would you kindly move, please? Pamela desperately needs to have her nappy changed.”
Even though the plane was guarded and civilians were not allowed on Cranwell, Hinchliffe turned the corner into the hangar and met a sly reporter dressed in mechanic’s clothes, waiting for him behind the plane.
“We all know Elsie Mackay is planning on taking the flight with you,” he insisted. “Why won’t you confirm it?”
Hinch almost called the guards and had him thrown out, but decided against it.
“Miss Mackay is one of the pluckiest women I have known,” he told the reporter calmly. “No pilot could wish to have a more efficient or reliable assistant. I only wish she could come. Unfortunately, it was found impossible for a woman to take part in the flight. Each can of petrol weighs some seventy pounds, and it would be impossible for a woman to handle them in order to feed the fuel tanks. The machine is only a two-seater, so Miss Mackay cannot be carried as a passenger.”
* * *
At Cranwell, with time ticking by, the Endeavour was stuck. Day after day, Hinch started out from the hangar, looking at snow and ice. The weather was not breaking. By the end of the first week in March, with their time almost up, Elsie could sense his irritability as the waiting stretched out. He no longer took meals with Emilie and his parents at the George Hotel. He sat and waited for the break he knew would come, wanting to be ready at a second’s notice. He actually allowed a Daily Express reporter in for an interview, stating that, although he intended to take a long-distance flight over land as an attempt to break the endurance record, “I shall try to be the first man to reach America by air, though the exact date depends on weather conditions and the time by which the airplane is fit to start.”
Still, exceptionally severe weather had been present on either side of the Atlantic, and an unprecedented snowstorm engulfed both England and Scotland.
By the tenth of March, their week at Cranwell was up, but both Hinchliffe and Elsie decided to stay put until they were forcibly thrown out. Maybe the weather would clear the next day, perhaps the day after that. Emilie Hinchliffe decided to go home for the weekend and return on Tuesday; the children were restless in the hotel, and with the snowdrifts everywhere, she doubted her husband was going anywhere.
In her fur-collared coat, she went to the hangar to say good-bye to her husband until Tuesday, and caught up with Ray showing a photographer and a reporter around the normally very guarded hangar.
“I have to do one thousand miles across the water on the part of the journey that matters most,” she heard him say as she walked up to them. “I made calculations on the basis of a fifteen-miles-per-hour headwind. If it is only ten, I shall be happy. Some people ask why I wait day after day. Well, I’m not going to commit suicide. I’m not going out on a wild adventure. I’ve worked out things to the last ounce. I know just what I can do and what I cannot do. Do you believe for a moment that I would start knowing with absolute certainty that I would come down in the Atlantic?”
Emilie smiled, the way pilots’ wives always do after hearing such discussions. She knew her husband. Nothing he said could rattle her; she knew he was meticulous, careful, vigilant. He would leave nothing to chance, and she understood that he would not charge up into that sky unless he had the utmost faith that they would make it over.
“May we take a photo of you two?” the photographer asked, and the Hinchliffes obliged. The shutter clicked a fraction of a second before Emilie smiled, and Ray was looking straight at the camera determinedly, confidently, with his hands in his pockets.
“I’ll be back on Tuesday,” she said as he leaned forward, his hand on her elbow, and gave her a kiss on the cheek. “I think we’re leaving just in time—the George is about to throw us out! You’ve never seen a three-year-old terrorize people as much!”
She laughed and he patted her affectionately on the arm, and his hand stayed there as she started walking away—his hand sliding down past her elbow, her wrist, and to her fingers, where they locked for a moment, held tight, then
let go.
Elsie and Sophie checked into the George that night under Sophie’s name in case there was a possibility of leaving the next day, and gave the innkeeper some extra money to kennel Chim. When they arose, however, a hailstorm was pounding down on Cranwell, and a telegram was waiting for them from the Air Ministry emphatically stating that their time was up and they must move the Endeavour. Within the hour, at breakfast, another telegram arrived, addressed plainly to Miss Elsie Mackay.
She stared at it for a long time before she opened it, because she already knew.
It was from her father.
* * *
Hinchliffe took a deep breath and showed the telegram to Gordon Sinclair.
“It’s of no matter,” he said. “We can’t move the Endeavour with all of this snow. I knew this was coming. I’ve received the measurements from Baldonnel Field, near Dublin, but unless we leave some of our fuel, we simply can’t take off from there. And Croydon . . . even if we did get permission from Imperial Airways, which I doubt, it wouldn’t be much better. Cranwell was our only choice.”
He sighed and stuffed the crumpled telegram into his pocket.
Then he went to tell Elsie the news.
She looked pale. Sophie sat next to her, being very quiet and patting her hand.
“What is it?” he asked. “What’s happened?”
“It’s from my father,” Elsie said, and handed it over.
ELSIE MACKAY
GEORGE HOTEL, GRANTHAM
MY DARLING GIRL STOP PLEASE DONT GO STOP I BEG OF YOU AND I COMMAND YOU TO CEASE PLANS AT ONCE STOP PLEASE THINK OF YOUR MOTHER STOP
—INCHCAPE
Hinchliffe nodded silently and then handed his telegram to Elsie.
She shook her head and huffed. “They certainly do explain each other, don’t they?” she observed.
“He must have seen Gillespie’s statement,” Sophie concluded.
“Damn Gillespie,” Elsie said, then bit her lip. “Well, what are we to do?”
Hinchliffe and Sinclair both sat down.
“We can’t leave anyway—there’s too much snow on the ground—so they will have to put up with us until it clears,” Hinchliffe said. “That may buy us some time, even if it’s just days. Will you reply to your father?”
Elsie laughed.
“It won’t stop with a telegram,” she said. “I’d expect police and the military here at any moment to bring us out in handcuffs.”
She handed the Air Ministry telegraph back to Hinchliffe.
“Mark my words,” she said earnestly. “This won’t be the end of it. I’m so sorry. He will destroy this.”
Elsie didn’t have to wait long for the cavalry to arrive in full force. By sundown on Saturday night, two chauffeured cars had pulled up to the otherwise less-than-aristocratic George Hotel, and three men got out. Into the lobby walked Viscount Glenapp, Kenneth Mackay; Baron Alexander Shaw, Margaret’s husband; and Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Bailey, Janet’s husband.
Elsie received them in her rooms upstairs and asked Sophie to take Chim for a long walk.
“You’ve no doubt why we’re here,” Kenneth said, taking off his hat.
“I know perfectly well why you’re here,” his sister replied. “And I appreciate your concern, but—”
“There is no ‘but,’ Elsie,” Kenneth continued. “The family is quite worried that you’re about to do something foolish and irreparable.”
“We’re here at the behest of your father to ask you not to go,” Frederick said.
“I told you, I am only involved financially,” she said.
“If that were true, we wouldn’t be here,” Alexander interjected.
“Please, Elsie,” Kenneth said. “If Mother even suspected—if she even had an inkling—it would take its toll. You can’t do this to us. We can’t lose you.”
Elsie took a deep breath, tired of lying, covering up, skirting the issue.
“And what about what I want?” she asked, throwing her hands up in despair. “Don’t I get a say in this, the course of my own life? Everything I do is for the family. I work for the family, I take care of the family . . . If you trust my judgments in the workings of P&O, why can’t you trust my judgment now?”
“At P&O, it’s about curtains and bedspreads,” Kenneth rebutted. “This is about your life.”
“You simply can’t make it from here to there, old girl,” Alexander commented. “Can’t be done. The death toll proves that.”
“That’s not true: we’ve taken every precaution,” Elsie argued. “We have done every calculation, we have charted every course. We are prepared for every danger.”
“Are you prepared for death?” Kenneth asked. “You’ve taken these so-called precautions, but are you prepared for your death?”
Elsie was quiet for a moment. “Yes,” she said simply. “I am.”
Kenneth walked across the room briskly and took her by the shoulders.
“Well, I am not,” he said, shaking her. “I am not. You cannot ask us to be prepared for such a thing. It is cruelty; how do you not see that?”
“Kenneth, I can’t halt my entire life in the face of fear,” Elsie replied.
“Then you tell me,” her brother cried angrily, then walked several paces from her, turned around, and pointed at her. “How shall I tell him? What shall I say? How shall I tell him that his beloved daughter was sunk under those waves with her idiotic plane, and for nothing? That his pain, which will last a lifetime, will be for nothing? Is that how I shall say it? And tell me, dear sister, how does he tell her?”
Elsie put her hand up to her mouth and fought her anger back. She shook her head.
“That’s unfair,” she said meekly as tears began to slide down her face. “That’s unfair. You hold me prisoner for a lifetime because of what may happen. And it won’t happen. I can only make choices that fit in the cage of Inchcape. But I will make it across. I can see it. I can see the lights, I can see the coast. I have that belief, Kenneth, I have that faith in myself. I know I can do this. Please believe me, Kenneth, I can do this!”
“You have a lovely life ahead of you, Elsie,” Kenneth said, coming back to her, seating her on the edge of the bed, then sitting alongside of her. “Don’t squander it on something as useless as this. This is something you simply cannot ask Mother and Father to endure for the rest of their lives. It would blacken them. You cannot expect them to go on with the unbearable burden of grief it would cause. They would never find another moment of happiness. It would turn them into ghosts.”
Elsie made no sound but wept, her head in her hands, hidden from Kenneth and her brothers-in-law.
“If you truly love them, you can’t place that suffering on them,” he said quietly. “Not when we just got Mother back.”
He put his arm around her.
“I know you’ve booked passage on the Razmak,” he said. “I’ll go with you. Let’s go to Egypt together and see them.”
To even her own surprise, Elsie nodded.
“You will?” Kenneth asked.
“Yes,” she whispered. “I will.”
“Wonderful,” he said. “Let’s get your things.”
Elsie shook her head.
“After all of this, I must tell Captain Hinchliffe myself and help make the changes for Sinclair to go in my place if a window opens,” Elsie said, wiping away the tears with the back of her hand. “Just because I won’t fly the venture doesn’t mean I can abandon it now. You have my word, I won’t go. But I can’t leave them like this; I do not want to.”
* * *
Captain Hinchliffe was not surprised when Elsie told him she had decided not to go. He knew her family ties were strong, and when he had seen her brother arrive, he had a feeling that she would bend. He was not angry with her; she needed to make that decision for herself, and he would not try to talk her out of it. Sinclair was a good pilot, and Hinchliffe felt more than comfortable with him as a copilot. He had agreed to fly even before Hinch had finished the sentenc
e, before he had even informed his wife.
Still, he couldn’t help but feel incensed that Elsie had been talked out of something that held so much purpose for her. She was dedicated to the flight, eager to fly, willing to put in any work that Hinchliffe demanded of her. He had tested her endurance, her patience, her skill, and she had succeeded far beyond his expectations. She, in her own right, was a pilot worthy of making the flight. Flying was what charged her, it was what sustained her, it was what she loved in her life. For her family to step forth and interrupt that—well, Hinchliffe could see no excuse for it. True, Emilie had met him when he was already a pilot, and she would never doubt him or ask him to not make a flight he felt confident about. But for a family driven by such passions, he would never understand why they could not let Elsie have hers. His own parents objected to the flight, but they would never ask him to withdraw from it.
And nor could he, even if he felt any hesitations about it. He was boxed in. He had left his job at Imperial and had no income. If he could make it to Philadelphia, a twenty-five-thousand-dollar prize waited for him, and he needed it. Any further delays would be disastrous. All he could hope for now was a break in the weather before the Air Ministry came and towed the Endeavour off of Cranwell themselves. And the German team was stuck in the same pattern he was: ready to go, waiting for the weather.
* * *
Sophie, on the other hand, burst into tears immediately when told that Elsie would not be on the flight. She collapsed onto the bed, sobbing from relief, happy that she no longer had to keep this horrible secret and that her friend had finally seen the recklessness.
“Sinclair will go in my place,” Elsie told her.
“You don’t mean they’re still going?” Sophie said, shocked.
“Of course they are,” Elsie replied. “I hold no doubts that they will be successful, none at all. I am not rescinding the flight because I have reservations, Sophie. I have only backed out because, now that our plans are known, I am afraid my mother will fall ill before we get to Philadelphia. That is all; that is the only reason.”