Kings of the Sea

by Van Every Frost, Joan

  She had gone only once more to Compton where the ship was being finished, and that was to see her launched. She met Jack Carr, who had been up in Scotland when she had been there before. He grinned at her around his cigar and raised his eyebrows at Christian. “A lady secretary, eh? Damn my soul if I don’t think that’s a smashing idea. I’ll have to get one myself.”

  Katharine should have been irritated with him, but he said it with such obvious good humor that she couldn’t take offense. Christian only laughed and passed it off, telling Carr she was worth any three men.

  At the christening of the Circe, as Katharine stood in the crowd waiting for the bottle of wine to smash against the ship’s prow, she suddenly felt two hands on her shoulders.

  “Kathy, love, how’ve you been? I’ve missed you,” came Charles’s familiar drawl.

  Oblivious of the people around her, Katharine swung around. “That’s a laugh. You had the entire voyage to ask how I’ve been. Take your hands off me, Charles — I don’t belong to you anymore.”

  “Hey!” he protested, laughing. “Come have a drink with me, Kathy, for old times’ sake.”

  “Hadn’t you better have it with Lady Fotheringay?” she snapped, but then was immediately sorry that she had given him the advantage.

  “Oh, her,” he said lightly, though his face grew still. “I wasn’t really serious about her. She had all that money, you see,” he added ingenuously.

  “You were serious enough about her or someone just like her to drop me after four years together without even saying goodbye,” she said evenly.

  “And I’m saying I’m sorry, I’ve been a fool. I didn’t realize how much I would miss you. Oh, Kathy, if you only knew how I’ve damned myself since. I was afraid to see you because I knew how angry you’d be, and rightfully so. I felt I wasn’t good enough for you.” A far cry from the malicious way he had acted on the Southern Cross, he was at his most boyishly charming, like a child who hopes that his breaking the cookie jar will be overlooked.

  It came to her suddenly that Charles was after something. He had certainly never before bothered to make himself so engaging when he had thoughtlessly stayed away without telling her, or forgotten her birthday or some other occasion or promise.

  “Charles, what do you want?” she demanded. “This isn’t like you.”

  He looked at her steadily. “I want you.”

  “And if I no longer feel anything for you?”

  He gave her a slow, sensual smile. “You do, love. You know you do.”

  Katharine stared at him wordlessly. There flashed across her mind a swift vision of three other men. Sam: dapper, his shrewd blue eyes twinkling behind the square lenses of his spectacles, his lips parted in an eager, almost wolfish grin as he lunged at some problem. Thomas: tall, lean, dark eyes watchful, a sardonic smile twisting his mouth, the shadow of his heavy beard always on his jaw. Christian: the wide, humorous mouth, the mane of tawny hair, the force and power to weld them all together. She realized that against these three Charles seemed like a spoiled boy, and something in her finally shriveled and died forever. The peach juice was now bitter in her mouth.

  She shook her head slowly. “No, Charles — not anymore.”

  He scowled at her, still only half believing. “You can’t mean that. There was a time you’d have done anything for me.”

  “I thought so,” she said. “There was something you wanted me to do, wasn’t there? Sorry, my dear, but I don’t think I am any longer interested in anything you would want of me.”

  Still unconvinced that she wasn’t his for the asking, he pouted. “Have it your way then, but don’t come running after me some other day. It’s now or never.”

  “Then it’s never, Charles,” she replied gently.

  “It’s that bastard Hand, isn’t it?” he exclaimed angrily. “Well, we don’t need you — the Iberia’s going to sail first no matter what he does.”

  “The Iberia?” His use of “we” wasn’t lost on her. He must have a vested interest of some sort in her.

  “She’s being built in Scotland, and she’s even larger than the Circe. My father and Lawrence Cassell have gone in together on her.”

  “What difference whose maiden voyage comes first?” She tried to sound casual.

  “There hasn’t been an important passenger steamship built for several years now, and whoever gets into New York first this time will have a ready-made cheering section, while the other will always be known as an also-ran.”

  “How near is the Iberia to being ready to sail?”

  “It’s no secret,” he answered loftily. “The first of April, if all goes well.”

  “Then it will be quite a race, won’t it?” she observed sweetly and walked away into the crowd of onlookers cheering the Circe as she floated serenely on the waters of the quiet bay.

  The Iberia, being fitted out on the Clyde in Scotland, was indeed neck and neck with the Circe, both scheduled for an April sailing, as the last weeks of March waned. The race would go to whichever was finished with the fewest mistakes. Both ships had had their initial trials, and nothing serious seemed to be wrong with either. It was reported that the Iberia, which had been fitted out with gas lighting, had had to revert to oil lamps because of leaks that appeared in the tubing joins even in the relatively quiet sailing of the trials. The Circe broke a steam pipe that was easily enough repaired. As it worked out, both ships were listed for an April 3 departure, the Iberia from the London Docks and the Circe from Liverpool, giving the Circe an edge, since the Iberia would have to put in to Liverpool as well to fill her steerage.

  As it turned out, the edge more than disappeared, for suddenly two of the three first officers failed to report, along with a good half of the crew.

  “I’ve been a captain for fifteen years, and I’ve not seen the like,” Robert Knight announced. “Jumping ship before the voyage begins is as rum a go as I’ve ever experienced. We followed your orders, Mr. Hand, and took only volunteers, and a damned hard time we had finding them, too, but now …” He shrugged and left the unfinished sentence to speak for itself.

  Christian looked terrible. He had lost weight and with it his normally ruddy complexion, and there were lines on his face that hadn’t been there before the Circe’s launch. “Get them any way you can, then,” he said wearily.

  Thus they recruited seamen as best they could, the last boatload of them brought in dead drunk on the night before sailing. They had had to stand helplessly by watching the Iberia load and chug off, smoke pouring jauntily from her funnel like a banner. Not until two days later were they able to raise anchor themselves and steam out through the mouth of the Mersey. It was all such an anticlimax that there were few of the festivities that usually attended a maiden voyage. Katharine could have wept for Christian; after all of his struggles he was receiving precious little of the glory that should have been his. She watched the passing shoreline with a heavy heart.

  Chapter IV

  “What’s the matter, Thomas? You look positively grim.” Katharine fished the instruments out of the boiling water with tongs and put them on a clean towel to dry.

  Thomas, who had just returned from a stateroom call, made a face. “Damn woman had nothing wrong with her — that is, if you discount sexual frustration. I thought there for a minute she was going to rape me.”

  Katharine laughed. “I don’t see why that should make you scowl so. It must be nice to be so irresistible.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing to be flattered over. Some women are simply terribly impressed with the idea of a doctor. I could be sixty years old and bald and some of them, like the spoiled bitch I just saw, would be every bit as eager to push me into bed.”

  “Grumble, grumble,” Katharine said, still laughing.

  “Katie, why don’t you come with me this morning when I do the steerage? It’s something everyone in the shipping business should do at least once.”

  “Has your boss?”

  “Of course he has. These are probably th
e best steerage quarters afloat.”

  “Won’t the people object to my staring at them as if they were animals in a zoo?”

  “They might, but we’ll make you look like a nurse and they’ll never notice you.”

  So it was that half an hour later they descended a companionway into another world, a far more vivid, vital, lively world than the first class above. Thomas had his doctor’s bag and Katharine carried a satchel containing all manner of bandages, swabs, cough medicine, and the like. The lower deck seethed with people who talked, gesticulated, played musical instruments, fought, wept, laughed with a lack of self-consciousness unknown above. Women unashamedly suckled their babies and people openly lined up for the bathing room or the two water closets. Despite these sanitary amenities, there was a definite miasma of unwashed bodies and even excrement that cut through the blue haze of tobacco smoke.

  As soon as she and Thomas were noticed, all of the activity ceased, and they were immediately surrounded by a jostling crowd, each member of which was trying to get their attention. Almost panicked, Katharine pressed close to Thomas, who seemed unconcerned. He reached over and released the rope that held a large table against the ceiling. Katharine saw that there were a number of such tables with hinged legs and attached seats.

  “But where do they all sleep?” she asked Thomas, puzzled.

  “In hammocks. They’re comfortable, take up little room even when slung, and can be folded away in the daytime.”

  He quickly organized a reasonably orderly sick call, asking relatives of those too sick to stand in line to wait to one side until he had taken care of the less serious ailments, which seemed to involve mainly cuts, colds, and stomach upsets of various kinds. The most serious of all these appeared to Katharine to be a child of five or six who had cut his knee and was carried by his father, his mother wringing her hands beside them. The wound was swollen, red, and angry-looking, with a sullen line of thick yellow pus parting the lips. The little boy whimpered, his eyes feverish.

  “Dammit, woman, you didn’t do what I told you, did you?” Thomas exclaimed. He turned to Katharine. “Give me that satchel, will you? I gave her the stuff to wash out the wound yesterday, and you can see she hasn’t touched it.”

  “He was hurting that much he wouldn’t let me near it,” the mother protested in a thick brogue.

  “You’ll kill him with kindness then,” Thomas snapped. “I suppose I’ll have to put him in the infirmary and do it myself. Have you other children?”

  The couple nodded reluctantly. “Four others,” the man said.

  “Then you may as well let him come alone. One of you can never keep track of so many, and we can’t have the whole lot up there.”

  The child with the cut knee began to shriek as be understood that he was going to be separated from his parents.

  “Only for a night or two,” Thomas said, “until we get that infection under control. Have him ready by the time we leave,” Thomas said, not entirely unsympathetically. “One of you can bring him up and stay with him until he’s used to it. What’s his name?”

  “Brian,” the father said proudly, ruffling his son’s dark curls. “Brian O’Donnell.”

  “All right, Brian,” Thomas said in a gentle voice, “we’ll see you later and get you all fixed up. All right?”

  Brian nodded dubiously, still hiccupping, his eyes swollen with tears.

  The steerage was roughly divided into male, female, and married quarters, and Thomas made it his business to thread his way through each, asking questions of anyone he saw was lying down.

  “There’re many of them won’t see a doctor,” he explained. “They’re terrified of them.”

  She looked about her at the crowded, loud, stinking cluster of humanity in their dark, ill-fitting, dirty clothing, and realized how painful and frightening life could be.

  “There,” Thomas added, seeing the expression on her face, “but for the grace of God go thou and I.”

  That afternoon when Brian’s mother left the dispensary, the boy was surprisingly calm about it, for which Katharine was thankful. It wasn’t until suppertime that she realized that his calm was really apathy, for he refused to eat and shortly thereafter began to shake with a chill.

  “That’s odd,” Thomas said. “His cut didn’t seem nearly as bad as it looked. I wonder if he could have gotten blood poisoning after all?”

  The infirmary was carefully walled off into two separate wards, a small one with private rooms for the first-class passengers and a long room running nearly the width of the ship for the steerage sick, of whom there were many more, not only because of their numbers but also because they were undernourished and often infected with something when they came on board, despite the watchfulness of the company agents.

  Katharine never had a chance to find out what Brian was like, for his temperature climbed day by day until the child seemed incandescent, the fever alternating with bone-rattling chills. She took her meals and slept in the dispensary now to stay with him. On the third day, as she was bathing him according to Thomas’s instructions, she noticed a dusky red mottling of the skin on his abdomen and groin.

  “I was afraid of that,” Thomas said wearily. “Ship’s fever. Typhus. We’ll have to get the rest of the family up here and hope that the others don’t come down with it. The nurse and steward I was supposed to have were still among the missing when we sailed, but we’ll get some volunteers from steerage who’ll gladly help for the better meals.”

  That afternoon the weather worsened, and seasickness was added to Brian’s already desperate condition. Katharine and Brian’s mother had their hands full, for one of Brian’s sisters was complaining of chills, the father said that he ached all over, and all four of the remaining children were seasick. The two women had to strap the small bodies into their beds as the ship pitched and lurched through the roughening sea. Thomas was down in the steerage trying to identify any other victims.

  That evening Christian showed up in the dispensary, seeming very incongruous in his evening clothes. Katharine was surprised to find him looking more harassed and worried than ever, but put it down to the outbreak of fever.

  “Be thankful you’re not in the steerage,” he said grimly. “They’re awash in vomit down there, and I understand from Thomas that there are at least five other possible fever victims. Dammit, there’s nothing going right on this voyage. All of the officers and half the crew are drunk — God knows where they’re getting it — and the captain says that if this storm lasts long enough we’re going to run low on coal because we’re having to make our way against the prevailing wind and seas. The only good thing about it is that the Iberia is just as bad off. We had her sighted before the weather closed in.”

  He looked at her now in a way she had thought never to see. A lock of hair had fallen down across one of her eyebrows, her sleeves were rolled up to her elbows, and her face was beaded with perspiration. A streak of vomit marred the whiteness of her apron. “Kate, there’s no reason for you to have to do this, you know. Thomas can recruit more help from the steerage.”

  “Someone has to supervise them. They’re horrified at the idea of bathing anyone sick, and if you don’t watch them, they won’t give the patients anything to drink, either.”

  He put his hand on her arm then. “You’re an amazing woman, Kate.”

  Katharine was too tired to feel more than a faint lift. She turned back to trying to coax some water down Brian’s youngest sister. “They vomit it up faster than we can get it down them,” she said wearily. “I don’t think little Brian is going to make it — I don’t even know why he’s still alive now.” The child lay glassy-eyed in a half coma with his knees drawn up, a hectic flush on his thin cheeks. Every time the ship pitched there was a wail from the children, who no longer bothered even to put their heads over the sides of the beds to vomit.

  “I’ll be back when I can,” Christian said. “I’ve got my hands full with the crew. We tossed a man in the brig this afternoon for r
efusing to get out of his bunk — drunk, of course — only to have the stokers refuse to work until we let him out.” He looked at her levelly. “So many of the original crew not showing up was hardly accident. I’d hate to think that pretty boy Charles had anything to do with it.”

  Katharine sighed. It was all too likely that Charles had had something to do with it, especially when there was money involved.

  “Anyway,” Christian went on, “the first-class passengers are complaining that the ship’s officers are insolent, and the way things are going we’ll be lucky to come off winners even if we do beat the Iberia to New York.” He suddenly looked very tired.

  Katharine felt — what? Pity, sympathy, compassion, even tenderness. He had hazarded everything that meant anything to him: his strength, his knowledge of ships, his manhood, his freedom, his very future. Now it seemed that all that might have been won was being snatched from him through no fault of his own. A mutinous crew and an outbreak of ship fever that at best would cause them endless time in quarantine while the Iberia sailed up the East River to the plaudits of the crowds waiting to cheer the winner.

  The storm seemed to go on and on. The voyage had changed from a triumph of man’s conquest of the Atlantic into a brutal nightmare that left even those not suffering the scourge of seasickness jaded and sore from the constant need to brace themselves against the rolling and bucking of the vessel as it labored over one giant foam-laced comber after another.

  Thomas managed superhumanly to engineer a mass disinfection of the steerage occupants and their quarters. He put the emigrants, men, women, and children alike, through the first-class showers, seeing that each and every one was rinsed down with a weak solution of carbolic acid. Meanwhile the entire complement of stewards on the ship ruthlessly scrubbed down the steerage and soaked clothes in buckets of carbolic. They could only hope that these draconian measures would bear fruit, for there were eight additional cases of typhus. No matter that these might be the last, the damage was done.