by Karen Harper
She hurried into the parlor to their mounted wall phone, lifted the earpiece, and stood on tiptoe to speak into the mouthpiece. You might know, Clayton had it hung for his height.
“This is Elinor Glyn.”
“Elinor, it’s George.”
Her heartbeat kicked up. Curzon. Finally. Finally. She closed her eyes as tears squeezed out onto her cheeks.
“No doubt you’ve been busy,” she said, trying to sound breezy and light.
“I’m sure you have too. My dear, I’m here at Parliament, so I can’t talk long. I have . . . news. This hasn’t been announced to the public yet but will be soon. I hear the Daily Mail and other newspapers will be all over it. I’m not sure of all the—ah, the results of this.” She heard him hesitate. She pictured that little frown that sometimes perched above his nose when he was upset or hurt.
“So,” he went on, “did your sister sail on the Titanic’s maiden voyage as you mentioned?”
“Oh, yes she did, with her husband and a secretary. What does that have to do with anything? What hasn’t yet been released to the public?”
“It’s on the wireless, since it’s a British ship. Word is that—dear Elinor, I’m sorry to tell you that it’s reported by another vessel in the area that the Titanic sent up emergency flares and radioed ships in the area for help. Soon its captain wired that it was in danger of sinking. I fear it has gone down.”
“That can’t be. Not that ship. Gone down?”
“In the North Atlantic. Evidently, the captain wired they hit an iceberg, so I wanted you to know—and I wanted you to know I miss you. I thought it best if I not call, but now I’ve brought you bad news, and I wish I could comfort you.”
She stood there, sucking air, not really dissolving into hysteria as she wanted. Mother would, though. She might have been through the terrible loss of her first beloved husband, but this might do her in. Yet something calmed Elinor, something strong like that iron rod poor Milor had to wear to keep him standing without pain.
“I am sure, whatever the dangers, Lucile will come through,” she told him in a steady voice hardly her own. “Somehow she always does. And I am sure, since you say you miss me as I do you, you will arrange for us to see each other soon. Thank you for your call.”
She amazed herself by hanging up right then. She had to show him she was strong, not beg or cry, despite the fact she collapsed against the wall, clinging to the phone box. But that big ship sinking? With all those people? Lucile. Cosmo. How dreadful the danger, and yet she knew somehow she’d see them both again—and, from this tragedy—see her beloved Lord Curzon, too.
When Lucile lifted her head to peek over the prow of their lifeboat, she saw chaos surrounded the waters near the Carpathia. Relief at last, but a different horror from the sinking of the Titanic. They were only one little craft among those hovering close to their rescue ship. So few boats—so few people survived?
Feeling dizzy and faint again, she collapsed next to Franks, who also lay freezing and exhausted in the bottom of their boat. All of them were shaking uncontrollably; Cosmo’s feet beat a regular rhythm against the slanted wooden floor as the crew rowed them closer to the massive side of the ship, like a huge, high wall to climb to safety.
Cries and sobs mingled from the other lifeboats with people being taken up rope ladders thrown over the side. Some were so weak or injured that they had to be hoisted aboard with ropes tied under their armpits or round their waists.
Cosmo helped Lucile sit up again as they waited their turn. A glance behind them revealed huge icebergs, but in the pale morning light, they seemed almost like giant pearls or opals. Was she losing her mind the way so many had lost their lives? What she and Cosmo had lost—jewels, clothes, papers—were nothing next to that.
A woman in the closest lifeboat, waiting like them to be taken on board, was screaming at boat after boat, “I can’t find my son. In your boat—is he there? Sixteen, red hair . . . my son Ronald! Has anyone seen my son?”
In shock and sympathy, Lucile would have sobbed herself into hysteria if she’d had the strength.
When it was their turn, neither Franks nor she could manage to climb the rope ladder they let down from the ship, and it took Cosmo and two of the Carpathia crew to get them aboard. Lucile fell to her knees, eternally grateful to be on a solid deck. A stewardess immediately put a warm blanket—a heated one!—round her shaking shoulders. Even before they were led away to companionways where the ship’s guests and crew had given up their cabins, they were offered brandy and hot coffee.
Once off the chilly deck, Lucile smelled baking bread, and in her near delirium imagined she was a little girl again in Canada with Grandmama helping Elinor and her in for supper. She overheard someone say the ship’s bakers had been baking bread to feed three thousand—but, surely there were not that many aboard here who had been saved.
“Count’s up to about seven hundred on board,” she heard a man say as if to worsen her fears. “But that’s all offa that huge ship what went down? Heard tell their manifest was over two thousand. And we got us some near death here, too, some died already on board. No more survivors in sight, though, Cap’n says.”
She wondered if Captain Smith, their host last night—was that just last night?—had gone down with his ship. And her sweet Irish cabin girl? Their table companions? Those who had signed her silly “madness” book? Though offered bread with butter and jam, she could eat nothing. Guilt rode her hard for the caviar and champagne they had too easily, carelessly downed on board that now dead ship.
“Ma’am, hot baths for you now, and we’ll help you walk to your guest cabin,” the stewardess was saying. “This way, ma’am, your husband, too. Here, let me help you.”
Cosmo actually ate breakfast while Lucile soaked in a tub of hot water. She felt too ill to eat but was given a sedative and put to bed in the cabin, which two kindly passengers had given over to Cosmo and her while Franks was just down the hall with some other women.
Lucile slid into darkness and slept, on and on, wandering long hallways, swimming through rough water. At first when she woke, she was confused. This wasn’t their cabin. But when she saw Cosmo bending over her in clothes that weren’t his own, with a frown on his face, it all rushed back at her. She must have slept around the clock, because sun dared to stream in the porthole behind him, gilding his silhouette, promising a new day.
“Are we headed for New York?” she asked him, her voice not her own as he took her hands in his. Finally, warm and steady hands.
“Yes, lass. But life—maybe New York, too—will never seem the same after our salvation when so many died. I sought out the men who saved us and wrote checks for them—just on paper since so much was lost. It was the very least I could do. They were so grateful and wanted to do something for us, so they’ve signed our lifebelts as a thanks. We’ll have those as a reminder of the lads who saved us.”
“A lot of new frocks gone too, but none of that matters,” she whispered, looking up at Cosmo as he sat carefully on the side of her narrow bed. He nodded and sniffed back tears. “People matter,” she went on. “Oh, my love, life is so dear! Hold me, please. Don’t ever let me go!”
Four days later, her legs still shaking, Lucile and the other survivors of the tragedy disembarked the Carpathia in New York Harbor. Though she always had prided herself in her erect posture, she leaned on the railing for stability and strength.
“A horde of people, including journalists and thrillmongers,” Cosmo muttered, glaring at the waiting crowd below. “Of course they can’t just leave us alone. I heard they’ve already written up stories on both the living and the dead, rumors and the like, cabled here and there, including ones sent to this ship.”
Cosmo had been right, she thought, recalling the silly signatures written in her Confessions book. She’d been shocked to realize that everyone who had autographed it the night the ship went down had drowned, millionaires and moguls, along with much of the crew, the captain, and most of the ste
erage passengers.
“Look, Cosmo,” she said, pointing. “Right at the bottom of the ramp, I see my friend Elsie de Wolfe. Why, I’ll bet she’s here to meet us with a motorcar and spirit us away from that noisy crowd. I have no desire to do interviews about this horror.”
“Not even for self-advertisement for once?”
That shook her a bit. Did he think she was too forward, too rapacious with all that? Or had this near-death experience just made her realize what really mattered in life?
Without the worry of their luggage, they headed down the ramp with Franks close behind. Strange, but Lucile recalled Elinor carrying on about how the newsmen pursued her about her illicit novel when she first disembarked in New York. It must have been a scene like this, noisy, raucous, jostling.
“There they are!” a man’s voice shouted. Lucile saw he tried to shove Elsie away. “There’s the English lord that paid a near empty lifeboat to row him and his rich wife away when people were dying!”
The words didn’t even register with Lucile at first, but she heard Franks gasp and felt Cosmo tighten his grip on her arm. How could they know of that incident already—and have perverted it so?
“Keep going,” Cosmo said out of the side of his mouth. “If they mean us, they are dead wrong, and I’ll not grace that with one word.”
Somehow Elsie fought her way to them. “Follow me!” she shouted and elbowed a man with a camera back, though he popped a light in their faces. Other blasts of light and clicks of cameras followed. Lucile lifted her pocketbook to shield her face.
Ordinary men were no match for Elsie or Cosmo as they made a path for Lucile and Franks and half-pulled, half-shoved them along through the press of people.
“Not far now!” Elsie cried. “I’ll get you to your apartment at the Ritz!” They walked faster, still pursued by men shouting questions. Ordinarily, Lucile would have laughed as the intrepid Elsie led them into a warehouse and managed, with Cosmo’s help, to pull a sliding door closed on their pursuers.
“Walk through here,” Elsie ordered. “It’s as close as I could get through the traffic and crowd. Despite the rumors and the yellow press, I never fathomed it would be that bad.”
They piled into the two backseats of her big motorcar, and her chauffeur drove them away from the docks.
“Elsie, again, I can’t thank you enough,” Lucile told her.
Elsie extended her gloved hand to Cosmo and shook his hand. “Your lordship,” she said. “Lovely to see again the man lovely Lucile loves.” She gave poor Franks, who sat beside her facing them, a one-armed, big hug. “Sorry to tell you, but there is much ado about the lower classes being drowned when the uppers bought their way out of that catastrophe, despite the fact many famous people drowned. I know you had big New York plans, Lucile dear, but there’s to be an inquiry back in Britain soon, and, I’m afraid, the names Lord and Lady Duff-Gordon have been fastened on like a dog with a bone. I’ve booked return passage for you both on a liner—if you’re courageous enough to get back on one—because you’re going to be hounded here. They are saying the most dreadful things, especially about his lordship.”
“They accuse him of bribing our way into a boat?” Lucile asked.
“And rowing away while others drowned.”
“It’s so untrue. That is not what happened!”
“I believe you,” Elsie said with a roll of her eyes. “But will they? Times are changing. No one knows their proper place anymore, and class jealousy, at least in this country—well, enough said for now.”
Tears sprang to Lucile’s eyes. Cosmo had done nothing but protect them and try to help the men who had been kind enough to row them to safety, men who were following the captain’s orders to launch that boat just then when they happened upon it. How desperately she had wanted Cosmo to love New York, to commit to staying here with her from time to time—and now that might be ruined.
Lucile choked out, “Even if we flee now, we shall return.”
“Or you, at least,” Cosmo said, frowning out the window. He was biting his lower lip. Her beloved man of honor was shamed, and she could only pray he wasn’t shattered, though he looked it right now. He’d always sat and carried himself so straight, her handsome athlete. But his head was down and his shoulders slumped. How would this charge of cowardice and cruelty be received in England, Scotland, too, his beloved home?
She reached out to hold his hand as tightly as she could. He was trembling, perhaps with fury as well as shock. Her stomach went into free fall, as if this motorcar were a small boat again plunging them into the rough, black sea.
PART IV
Paris and Beyond
1912–1919
CHAPTER Twenty-Six
As Elinor took a side seat in the Scottish Drill Hall at Buckingham Gate in London a month after the Titanic disaster, she was glad no one looked her way. She wore a large hat with a veil so that she didn’t have people staring at her. It had been bad enough this last month with Lucile and Cosmo at the center of attention of journalistic ridicule or even nasty comments to their faces, however much their friends stood by them. Even today, a crowd of newspapermen had gathered outside waiting to get in for this Board of Trade Inquiry on the loss of the Titanic.
Despite her own trials with the so-called press, Elinor wanted to be here to support Lucile and Cosmo. How ridiculous and scurrilous a lie that they were cowards willing to use their wealth to escape drowning and leave others behind. A good deal of class jealousy stirred the pot too when, after all, she and Lucile had fought their way up from next to nothing. Granted, Lucile had married well, and she had not. Clayton was hiding out of the country. At least she didn’t have to deal with him here, but only pay his distant hotel, gambling, and drinking debts.
A stir swept through those seated, but it was not yet the entry of the president of the court, Lord Mersey, nor even the Duff-Gordons’ defense lawyer, Mr. Tweedie. Just more of the swells, as she and Lucile used to think of the elite of the land. And—oh no, it couldn’t be—but there came Gordon Selfridge, a wealthy department store owner and one of Elinor’s latest admirers whom she had not turned away as she had some others. He was a brash American, wealthy, gregarious, and, unlike someone else, he enjoyed being seen with her. She had nicknamed him her American Napoleon, and he sometime called her his Josephine.
She had actually tried to make her beloved, secretive Milor jealous, and Gordon’s attentions had done the trick. She’d dared to take a small house in Paris partly because Milor had vowed he would come to visit her there.
Lucile looked stunning when she entered, and poor Cosmo looked stunned. Of course, he was hurt and angry, which he controlled with his iron resolve. Elinor listened intently to the opening remarks and sat forward as Lucile was called to testify.
“Lady Duff-Gordon,” the accusing lawyer began the questioning after she was sworn in, “is it not true that your husband promised the men rowing the rescue boat five pounds each to get you away from the sinking ship?”
“No, sir. He offered them five pounds each because they had lost their entire kit, as they called it. That was long after they rowed away. We never would have been in that small boat if we had not simply happened upon it when they were launching anyway, and at Captain Smith’s orders.”
“I see,” he said, leaning toward her with a shake of his head that bounced his periwig. “An interesting slant on things.”
“I don’t think you do see, and isn’t that a slanted comment? Terrible rumors have been spread and distorted by those who were not in this great tragedy. For example, Captain Smith was not drunk, and we have heard that bandied about, even in the newspapers. Colonel Astor hardly shot off a gun to force women from their places in the boats, because he died aboard.”
“As most honorable men did, Lady Duff-Gordon.”
“Is it not true, Your Honor,” she said, turning to look up at the presiding Lord Mercer, “that a greater percentage of third-class passengers were saved than those of first class? Not,
of course, that that would excuse so many precious lives lost above- or belowdecks. But why so many vile and untrue rumors about what happened on board among those like us who did our best to survive along with my secretary, Miss Francatelli? Neither she nor I took up a place in the large, public lifeboats so that more could survive. My husband’s writing a check for five pounds each for those men the next day was an act of charity and gratitude, not some bribe or payoff.”
Lord Mercer banged his gavel down, and the lawyer sputtered, “You will not address Lord Mercer directly, my lady. You will answer the questions put to you and not ask them nor lecture the court! And your husband after you!”
But that was Lucile, Elinor thought as her sister didn’t flinch but stood erect at the bar until the hubbub died down and the questioning went on. Some in the audience applauded her when she stepped away after another half hour of being grilled. She had given not an inch, and neither did Cosmo thereafter during his two-hour, brutal cross-examination, though he was obviously suffering from being accused and dragged into this shameful show. Anyone who knew Lord Duff-Gordon knew he was honest and honorable to the core.
Titanic cowards, balderdash! Elinor thought. They were sacrificial lambs but lambs that roared.
“You did splendidly, my love,” Lucile assured Cosmo as they left the courtroom, arm in arm, as if to prop themselves up. She knew they both felt utterly drained. What a skewed proceeding! Cosmo had called it a roasting.
But they hadn’t been prepared for the raucous crowd they faced on the street. Newspapermen, of course—they’d grown used to them and to snide remarks—but this was a group of obviously working-class people, and so large a one that their motorcar had been forced to park on the other side of it, so they’d have to run the gauntlet.
