Prisoner of Midnight

by Barbara Hambly

  While in the bedroom with Miranda, Lydia had discreetly re-bandaged her shoulder, with the little girl’s awed assistance (‘I won’t tell, cross my heart an’ hope to die an’ stick a needle in my eye. Did you get stabbed by a German spy, Mummy?’). Miranda was clearly and utterly thrilled.

  She had also changed into a tobacco-colored Worth walking suit – again with her daughter’s help – and demonstrated to the little girl how to wash bloodstains out of a cotton shirtwaist (honestly, what kind of an upbringing is the poor child getting?). As she put on the jewelry which she customarily wore with the Worth ensemble, she paused, fingering the sautoir necklace of pearls and raw emeralds with a pendant of an enameled mermaid.

  Simon had given it to her.

  Even had she believed in prayer, she was fairly certain that one wasn’t supposed to pray for the safety of people who’d killed approximately 27,600 people (she had once calculated, at the rate of two per week over the course of 362 years) in order to prolong his own existence.

  It would be dawn in an hour. She hoped he’d found somewhere safe to sleep.

  She hoped there had been enough serum in the hypodermic to allay the growing fire of the poison in his veins.

  She hoped Aunt Louise would put her tears down to exhaustion and worry about Miranda.

  Shortly after first light Mr Travis, their cabin steward, rapped gently at the door of the suite, with the information that order had been restored to the ship. ‘As far as we can tell, M’am,’ the young man said, bowing a little warily to the still-fuming Aunt Louise, ‘the men who were killed were German saboteurs. Some of the emigrants saw them running from the engine rooms after the explosion. Seems that three of them were working for Mr Cochran as detectives. One fellow ran all the way up here, hoping, I think, Cochran would protect him, though of course poor Mr Cochran had nothing whatever to do with any of it. Like his nephew says, even if he wasn’t a loyal American, why would a man that rich want to take money from the Germans?’

  ‘I trust that the men who perpetrated that dreadful outrage,’ proclaimed Louise, ‘have been placed under lock and key?’ She looked at the stout, freckled young man as if he were personally responsible for seeing this done.

  Mr Travis looked evasive. ‘They will be, of course, M’am.’

  Meaning, Lydia guessed, as she followed her aunt from the suite, that there was absolutely no way of telling which members of the mob had actually beaten Mr Kimball unconscious and thrown him from the rail of the Promenade, into the freezing black ocean eighty feet below. Or which men had clubbed Cochran and Barvell to death.

  She had wondered how she was to slip away from Aunt Louise to have a look at Cochran’s suite. She was well aware that the redoubtable dowager had eyes in the back of her head and would seize her before she had stepped back two feet. But in the event, it was Aunt Louise who led the way, not to the gangway down to the dining room and an unwontedly early breakfast, but around the corner to the Promenade onto which the rooms of the two American parties opened, only to find another steward posted outside the Cochran suite’s door.

  ‘Well, really!’ Aunt Louise sounded as indignant as if she’d had some legitimate business there. With the haughty air of one who has been insulted by the merest suspicion that she’d try to view the scene of last night’s violence, she turned on her heel – ‘Come along, Lydia … and take those frightful spectacles off your face!’ and stalked to the stairway. Lydia trailed meekly at her heels.

  Though breakfast service began in First Class at seven, the white-and-gold dining room was generally deserted until almost nine. Not this morning, however. Nobody in First Class had slept anyway – Lydia noted several people clothed in their dinner costumes of last night – and at the first moment of their liberation from their staterooms, they had swarmed to the source of coffee, muffins, and minced chicken on toast.

  And not, Lydia reflected uneasily, simply to discuss the murder of two First Class passengers and three of Cochran’s detectives (whom nobody in First Class had liked). Though there was far more conversation going on than she had ever heard in that room on the voyage, it was hushed, like the growling of the sea on rocks. ‘Subs,’ she heard as she passed among the tables in Louise’s wake. ‘Spies … dead in the water …’

  Dead indeed …

  She waited for the inevitable moment when Aunt Louise was stopped by Mrs Tilcott, murmured, ‘Excuse me a moment’ and was gone before her aunt could turn around and tell her not to be ridiculous. She put on her glasses as she went.

  ‘Mrs Asher!’ John Palfrey sprang to his feet as she approached his table. His face was pale and haggard, his eyes wide as he caught her hands. ‘Thank God you’re well! You didn’t get caught up in any of that ruckus last night, did you?’

  Lydia shook her head, not feeling up to the invention of a story she would, she suspected, be hard put to remember once she’d had some sleep. ‘But I saw Colonel Simon on the boat deck,’ she fibbed, and the young man’s wide shoulders relaxed.

  ‘Thank goodness.’ He drew her down to a vacant seat at his table, gripped her hand and lowered his voice. ‘I was afraid – I don’t know what I feared. When he didn’t show up … And then there was that explosion, and the riot below decks. What happened? I can’t believe Mr Cochran was mixed up in sabotage for the Germans!’

  ‘Do you know—’ Lydia began, and her words were cut off by the silvery chime of a water glass being tapped at the captain’s table. Turning, she saw first, to her astonishment, Mrs Cochran, clothed in black and veiled as became a widow (she must have gotten the weeds from Mrs Tilcott or one of the other widows in First), sitting at the captain’s side (with young Mr Oliver Cochran on her other side, holding her hand). Second, she noticed Aunt Louise looking sharply all around for her; and third, Captain Winstanley standing up at his place and signaling for attention. He looked absolutely exhausted but his smile was as charming, and his voice as firm, as ever. Part of the qualifications for Captain, I suppose …

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘First and foremost, I want to thank you all for your patience, good sense, and cooperation in the events of last night.’

  According to Ellen, Mr Bowdoin and a number of other First Class passengers had shown none of these attributes, but Lydia forbore to say so.

  ‘As I suppose all of you know, there was an act of sabotage perpetrated on board last night. A small bomb was set off by German agents in the shaft tunnel aft of the ship’s engine room at shortly after midnight. The hull was not damaged – I repeat, there was no damage to the hull of the ship. We are in no danger of sinking.’

  ‘Unless the Jerries come along and torpedo us,’ muttered the industrialist, Tyler, on Palfrey’s other side. ‘We’re sitting ducks …’

  ‘The rioting below decks,’ the captain continued, ‘was triggered by the saboteurs being sighted fleeing from the scene of the crime. Three of these men were killed—’

  ‘Serve ’em right,’ said Mr Allen, across the table, and Mrs Allen nudged him sharply.

  ‘—but tragically, one of them – whose “cover” was being in the employ of Mr Spenser Cochran, of Chicago – fled back to Mr Cochran’s suite, hoping to hide there. The rioters pursued him, killed him, and in an act of outrage and hysteria, also, tragically, killed both Mr Cochran and his personal physician, Dr Louis Barvell.’

  ‘What the hell did he expect,’ groused Mr Tyler, momentarily drowning out the captain’s graceful words to Mrs Cochran, ‘if he goes around hiring kraut spies?’

  Someone at one of the tables closer to the captain asked him a question, and Captain Winstanley said, as if the matter were well in hand, ‘Every effort is being made to repair the ship’s wireless and to summon assistance as quickly as possible. The S.S. Northumbria and the HMS Ruritania were last recorded as being only a few days behind us. Flares will be launched beginning at dusk this evening—’

  ‘What, so the Jerry subs can find us quicker?’ called out someone, and a female voice chimed sharply, ‘Car
lton, hush!’

  Someone had asked another question: ‘So far as we know, the failure of the ship’s wireless was entirely coincidental and had nothing to do with the sabotage, though that, too, is under investigation. And to address the concerns that I’m sure all of you are feeling—’

  The captain raised his voice slightly, and the growling murmur of every sentiment from ‘letting murderers get away’ to ‘what if there’s more of ’em?’ simmered to stillness again.

  ‘Watchers are on duty fore and aft,’ Winstanley continued, ‘with the best visual equipment on board the ship. Lifeboats are prepared and ready, and though the danger is slim, you are all urged to keep your life jackets on hand. Should an emergency occur in the next forty-eight hours – before relief ships can arrive – obey all orders given you by officers and crew, immediately and without question. They are given for your protection. If an incident does occur’ – he couldn’t seem to bring himself to say, If we get torpedoed – ‘report to the boat deck at once. Do not attempt to return to your cabins for any reason. The officers and crew are trained professionals. If everyone keeps their heads and does as they’re told, all should be well no matter what happens.’

  Nor, apparently, could he say in so many words, We should all survive. Or, Most of us should survive. Or, Very few of you will drown …

  ‘I won’t be quiet,’ sobbed Mrs Bowdoin at the next table, echoing everyone’s thoughts. ‘All well for him to go on about all being well, but a torpedo could be heading for us, right this very second …’

  Miranda. Lydia’s stomach lurched at the thought of the child she’d left sleeping – deeply content – on her bed, small hands curled possessively around Mrs Marigold’s stout silk waist.

  Am I really going to go to the bottom without ever seeing Jamie again?

  She realized she was trembling all over, but shook her head at Captain Palfrey’s offers of coffee or tea. ‘Take me back to my stateroom, if you would,’ she said, tightening her hand over his. She really should, she knew, go speak to Mrs Cochran (and say what? Can I go in and search your husband’s effects?), or try to sort out the chemicals she’d pinched from Barvell, or go below decks in search of Mr Heller …

  But all she wanted, now, was to be beside her daughter. Because, as Mrs Bowdoin had said, a torpedo could be heading for them, right that very second …

  She knew she was so tired that things seemed distorted, and that she was incapable of thinking clearly. But as Palfrey led her up the steps of the gangway to the private Promenade, she could see the watchmen standing, back to back, in the little white crow’s-nest, and she shuddered at the thoughts their vigil brought to her. The sea lay vast all around them, under a sky now roofed with gray cloud. Nothing – no land – not the slightest possibility that anyone would know what happened to them.

  She couldn’t imagine how so slender a thing as a periscope would be visible in it, even from up there.

  One of the men moved, scanning the surface of the churning ocean, and the daylight winked palely in the lenses of his glass.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Lydia dreamed, and dreaming, with Miranda in her arms, it was as if she sat in some dark place that stank of rats and wet filth. A place that shivered, rhythmically, with the soft repeated clinking of monstrous chains. Water lapped below, and she could see Simon, lying incongruously in a hammock, slung a few feet above the unseen surface of black deeps, profoundly asleep.

  He looked like a dying man, a man long dead; a scarred skull face half concealed by the spiderweb tangle of his colorless hair. He shuddered in his sleep, and cried out, as the poison ate his bones. Once she thought he said her name.

  In her dream she saw the ship’s makeshift morgue, bodies laid out now not only on the tables, but on the floor between them, their faces covered with a rime of frost. Lovely Pavlina Jancu. Little Luzia Pescariu. Sturdy dark-haired Kemal Adamic, with a folded packet of Koranic verse lying on his breast. Pilgrims who would never reach the promised land. They’d all been moved to the same table, so that Mr Cochran and Mr Barvell could each have a private resting place. I should go in and search their pockets, she thought in her dream, in case Barvell carried his notes around with him.

  If the ship is torpedoed, none of this will matter at all.

  Vodusek, Slavik, and two of Mr Cochran’s detectives lay on the floor along one wall. Even in the absolute darkness of the refrigerator room, she could see the horrible wounds on their bodies, faces, heads. Vodusek’s throat had been cut and his skull crushed. She wondered if Pan Marek had done that.

  For a fleeting moment, she found herself in a tiny stateroom, stuffy and eerily silent with the stillness of the engines. Mr Goldhirsch lay on his bunk, Yakov, Rivkah, and his portmanteau full of gold and credit papers all wrapped in his long arms. His face was absolutely expressionless but his lips moved in his long gray beard, repeating the name of God, over and over, while tears streamed from his open eyes. Weirdly, Lydia had a blinking glimpse of the boy – nineteen years old and almost his grandfather’s tall, gawky double, but with a gentler mouth – climbing the front steps of an ivy-covered college building somewhere in America. Somewhere in the future. Then a lovely, bespectacled young woman who had to be Rivkah, studying something – a chemistry text? – in some well-furnished library. The sight of them, safe and protected in that new land, that new time, made her want to cry.

  She saw Jamie, unshaven, shockingly thin, haggard with fatigue and sleeplessness, lying on the floor in some dark place. He was in uniform, covered with a coarse blanket and a German officer’s coat. A quenched lantern stood close to his hand, his hand wrapped, round and round, with silver chain; she wondered where he was. She tried to call out to him, to tell him she was all right, Miranda was all right – to tell him that she loved him – but could not wake herself to do so.

  I’m sorry. Jamie, I’m sorry …

  But he had wired her. There is nothing to forgive.

  Then she was below the sea. Like a mermaid in green-gray dimness she could see the submarine, the froth of bubbles around its lean flanks and streaming back where its periscope cleaved the surface over her head.

  The water carried the voices of the men to her, muffled but strangely clear. She could smell the stale, filthy air inside the vessel, exactly as Heller had described it to her. Dirty clothes, piss in the bilges, the stink of men’s unwashed bodies. Like the Front. For them – as it had been for Heller – that is the Front. The place where the War is fought. For a moment, too, she smelled – felt through her skin, itched in her bones – the other things Heller had told her, about being underwater, all those weeks. Living on top of one another like pigs in a sty. Constant fear. Mental cloudiness, when the fumes that leaked from the engines grew too thick. Hatred and disgust with the tiniest mannerisms of one’s shipmates, and the vigilance that ground one to exhaustion. Dreams of home shredded away by the relentless demands of simply getting through each day.

  She heard the captain’s voice saying something about tonnage. About Americans.

  About Stadt aus Gold.

  Heute Abend.

  Tonight.

  The voices of Ellen, Mrs Frush, and Aunt Louise arguing woke her. ‘The child needs to go out onto the deck for some fresh air, and then back down to her nursery for some lunch. This is no place for a little girl.’

  Miranda, rumpled and still in her nightdress, looked up warily from her paper dolls, spread out over the foot of the bed. Lydia sat up and said, ‘You’re quite right, Mrs Frush.’ She groped for her glasses on the small table beside her. ‘Would you please go down to the nursery and fetch up clean clothes for Miranda? And Ellen, could you draw her a bath up here? In view of the … situation … I think I’d rather have my daughter up here, closer to the boat deck, until we’re rescued.’

  ‘If by situation you mean torpedoes,’ declared Aunt Louise – Miranda turned her head sharply at the word – ‘it’s a ridiculous notion, and Captain Winstanley is an idiot for getting the passengers riled up with
his constant harping on the subject. I shouldn’t wonder if the hysteria among the peasants in Third Class could be traced back to his unfounded terrors.’

  ‘Be that as it may –’ Lydia suspected that what her aunt really wanted was an argument, and kept her voice cheerfully level, pretending she was addressing some infuriated supply sergeant on the subject of bandages – ‘I should like to keep Miranda up here until we’re relieved.’ She repeated this statement twice more, in the identical words, in reply to her aunt’s contention that Miranda would actually be much happier in her nursery on C Deck with Mrs Frush, and that the Promenade Suite was no place for a child.

  Not trusting her aunt as far as she could throw the parlor piano, Lydia then assisted Ellen to bathe Miranda and dress her in the neat white frock Mrs Frush fetched up, and took her along – with Ellen in tow – to the infirmary, to call on Dr Liggatt.

  ‘Lord God, woman, what happened down there?’ The Virginian turned haggard eyes on Lydia as she slipped to the front of the line outside the infirmary door and peeked around the door frame. ‘And what in God’s name were you doing down on F Deck in the first place – which is where at least three of the people I’ve seen this morning say you were. Thank you, Mrs Roberts,’ he added, to a stout young woman with an apron pinned over her fashionable pink walking suit, ‘if you could put a dressing on this one –’ he’d just finished stitching up a swarthy little man’s split forehead – ‘and— Lordy!’ This when Lydia slipped her blouse down from her shoulder to show the makeshift dressing. ‘You been to the wars, M’am, and no mistake! You should have come in earlier with that! Let me have a look …