Distant Waves: A Novel of the Titanic: A Novel of the Titanic

by Suzanne Weyn

  We hurried over and they hugged like old friends. Mimi introduced Blythe first and then the rest of us.

  Speaking English with a heavy French accent, Juliette LaRoche reached behind her full skirt and drew out a little girl who was so petite and precious she might have been a doll come to life. She had the same olive skin and dark hair and eyes as her mother. She wore a lacy white frock with a matching bow. The lace on her little white socks matched that on the collar of her dress. “This is Simone,” Juliette said, and the girl smiled shyly. “Louise, my younger daughter, is with my husband,” she explained.

  Just then a handsome man with a mustache and in a long, dark coat joined her. He held a precious little girl in his arms who was a slightly younger version of Simone. “This is my husband, Mr. Joseph LaRoche,” Juliette said.

  I tried not to stare. Emma and Amelie remained composed also. Mimi and Blythe, though, could not even make a pretense of calmness. Their flabbergasted expressions gave them away instantly.

  “I see that you are surprised that my husband is a black man,” Juliette said, taking it in stride. “Is this a problem for you?”

  “Not at all,” said Blythe, recovering from her surprise enough to take Louise from Joseph LaRoche. “Not one bit.”

  Mimi, for once, was speechless. I could tell it was anything but a problem for her.

  This seemingly happy couple was, perhaps, a view of her own future.

  Chapter 27

  Mimi was quickly preoccupied with Ninette after she boarded in Cherbourg. Dressed in the latest Parisian finery, she greeted Mimi as though she were her long-lost sister, and I instantly felt that familiar pang of annoyance and jealousy that had plagued me in New York.

  The biggest excitement, of course, was the arrival of John Jacob Astor the Fourth, his young bride, and his adorable Airedale, who was named Kitty despite the fact that it was clearly a dog. In the buzz of excitement surrounding their arrival, I heard someone say that Colonel Astor was worth more than thirty million dollars! I couldn’t imagine such wealth.

  I would have thought that a person with that much money who had just come back from a European tour with his new young wife would look carefree and happy. Astor didn’t, though. He had a serious, almost scowling demeanor, as though great concerns weighed him down. His wife was very pretty, I thought, in her big, floppy, striped hat. The difference in their ages was, indeed, pronounced.

  Thad was at my side and seemed to be the only one not dazzled at the sight of the famous Astors. “Why does one guy need that much money?” he asked sourly.

  “So he can fund Tesla and make the world a better, safer, more humane place,” I suggested optimistically.

  Thad’s crabbed expression slowly softened until he smiled. “All right. Hold on to that thought.”

  That night Li let the three of us stay in her room. We couldn’t bunk with Mimi or Blythe since their employers didn’t know we were there without tickets and probably wouldn’t have liked it.

  Li told the steward she was cold, and he brought her a pile of extra blankets, which Amelie and Emma snuggled into on the top bunk. I wrapped into another blanket and settled in on the floor. We were lucky because Li was supposed to have had a bunkmate rooming with her but she’d apparently missed the boat.

  “You have good young man,” Li said to me, leaning on her elbow in her bunk. “Thad wonderful to me and my family.”

  “Have you known him long?”

  She nodded. “My parents cook for his family back in China. They good people. They lend my father money to open restaurant in America. You love him?”

  “I’m not sure yet. I haven’t spent much time with him,” I answered. Did months of talking to each other in our minds count? Probably not, though it felt like it should. I’d spent so much time thinking of him, going over every inch of his face in my thoughts, carrying on imaginary conversations, that it felt as though I’d known him much longer than I actually had.

  “You love him,” Li declared, speaking confidently. Then, with a wide yawn, she turned and fell asleep.

  I knew she was right.

  The next morning, Thad rapped on the door and entered with a wonderful-smelling box filled with hot chocolate and pastries. “Good news,” he said as we huddled over our steaming cups. “Tesla has talked to Astor. Tonight, he’ll speak to him about creating lights on the shipping lanes, and then Astor agreed to see him again about the earthquake machine.”

  “When will that be?” I asked.

  “Not sure,” Thad replied, wiping croissant crumbs from his lips. “He said he needs a time when there’s a lot of ice around so he can demonstrate.”

  Amelie looked up sharply at Emma.

  “Ice?” Emma echoed, looking worried. “Has anyone seen Mr. Stead?”

  “Not yet, but I think we should look for him today.” I turned to Thad. “Has that creepy guy shown up again?”

  “No,” he replied, “but unless he somehow sneaked away at Cherbourg—which would have been hard to do—he’s still around somewhere.”

  There came another rap on the door, and Blythe came in with the two little LaRoche girls. I offered hot chocolate. Blythe was full from breakfast, but we got some cups for the little girls. Blythe was thrilled to have discovered that second-class passengers could eat in the same salon with the first-class passengers. “Mimi and Ninette had breakfast with Madeleine Astor,” she told us excitedly.

  “Madeleine Astor is younger than Mimi,” Thad supplied. “She’s eighteen!”

  “Who cares?” Blythe dismissed the remark. “Our Mimi is hobnobbing with the rich and famous.”

  “Mmm,” I said pensively. I was wondering how much hobnobbing she’d be doing if they knew her secret.

  “Do they allow Mr. LaRoche into the salon?” Thad asked. “Have you noticed that he’s the only black person on the ship?”

  “Thad!” I scolded, nodding to the LaRoche girls.

  “That’s all right. They only speak French,” Blythe said. “Mr. LaRoche has an engineering degree from a French university, but he can’t get any work because of his color. And do you know why he and the girls are the only black people on this ship?”

  “Why?” Emma asked.

  “They won’t let black people buy a ticket in England or America. They tell them they’re sold out. The only reason he’s on board is because his white wife bought the tickets.”

  “That’s disgraceful!” I cried.

  Blythe nodded in agreement. “Mr. LaRoche is from Haiti and his family is very well-to-do there. He and Juliette and the girls are traveling back to his home to live.”

  “Haiti! What a coincidence. That’s where Mimi is from.”

  “Mimi?” Thad questioned, which required me to go into the whole story.

  Li shook her head sadly. “It too bad the way people can be,” she remarked. “My father he thinks white people crazy,” she said, tapping her forehead.

  “That’s why a man like Tesla who is for all the people can’t get off the ground,” Thad commented.

  That morning we went to Queenstown, Ireland, to pick up more passengers. It was cold but the sky was a startlingly crystal blue.

  As in France, they came out to the Titanic by boat, so we never actually docked in Ireland. I got to stand on deck and at least see the lovely lush green hills and pastures the country is so justly renowned for.

  Thad was in with Tesla, preparing for their first demonstration of the device to illuminate the night skies. Blythe was occupied with the little girls while Emma and Amelie did a tarot reading for Li in the cabin.

  I was beginning a stroll on the deck when Mimi caught up with me. “Jane, I’ve just come from Victor, and the most wonderful thing has happened.”

  “What?”

  “I told him about…me.”

  “And?” I asked, although a smile was already spreading across my face. I could tell from her expression that it had gone well.

  She took both my hands in her own. “He doesn’t care! He laughed,
in fact. He said because he’s Italian, people make derogatory cracks, and he just ignores them. And seeing the LaRoche family has made me feel so much braver about it all. I see how happy they are, and how beautiful their little girls are. Juliette did the right thing to marry the man she loved and not worry about the rest.”

  Words didn’t seem enough, so I hugged Mimi, truly happy for her. “When will the wedding be?” I asked once we separated.

  “In three days.”

  “Three days?” I cried, aghast.

  “We’ll be married on the fourteenth. It’s the day before your birthday, I know. You don’t mind, do you?”

  “I don’t care about my birthday. It just seems awfully soon,” I replied.

  “We want to be married before we get to New York. Mr. Guggenheim has asked Captain Smith to marry us on board the ship, and he has agreed. He and Ninette want us to travel with them to Italy almost as soon as we reach New York. They’ve offered to get us a stateroom together—a sort of honeymoon. It’s the only way we could afford one.”

  “Mother will be hurt, if you marry without her there,” I pointed out.

  Mimi considered that for a moment. “When we return from Italy, we’ll have a second ceremony in Spirit Vale. Every ghost in western New York will be invited.”

  “That would probably make her feel better,” I agreed. “It would be spectacular to be wed on the Titanic.”

  “Ninette will give the banquet afterward. It will be so much better than any wedding we could give for ourselves. Much, much grander!”

  “Can I invite Thad?” I asked.

  “Of course—invite Tesla, too.”

  I couldn’t believe everything was happening so fast. I almost got caught in the whirlwind of it. But then I realized that, with Mother not here, I had to ask the most important question of all.

  “Mimi,” I said, “you’re sure Victor is the one?”

  Mimi took my hand. “I know it seems sudden, Jane, but Victor and I have spent all our free time together for the last seven months. We’ve become so close, and I love him with all my heart.”

  “And he loves you, too?” It sounded as though he did, but I had to be sure.

  “I know he does,” she confirmed.

  Victor must have been waiting for his cue to join us, because he appeared a moment later. “So, does she approve?” he asked, smiling.

  “How could she not?” Mimi replied.

  “Only if you promise to treat my sister like a queen,” I said.

  “I will,” he promised, “because she is a queen, the queen of my heart.” He turned to Mimi and told her he had to go lay out Mr. Guggenheim’s evening clothes. “But after dinner, I will dance with you under the moonlight,” he told her before sweeping her into a passionate kiss.

  I didn’t want to stare, so I turned and watched the ocean waves until a tap on the shoulder made me turn back. “Good-bye, my sister to be,” Victor said. “Maybe you and your boyfriend will join us dancing tonight.”

  “Oh, Thad’s not my boyfriend,” I protested.

  “Sure he is,” he insisted. “I’ve seen you walking together. I know the look. After all, I’m in love, also.”

  “Are you in love with Thad, Jane?” Mimi asked when Victor had left.

  “I think it was love at first sight,” I admitted. Once the words were spoken, I knew they were true.

  “And here you are together with him on this ship—all quite by accident,” she said happily. “I knew this would be a wonderful trip, but I never imagined everything would work out this well. No wonder they call it the Ship of Dreams.”

  If only it would work out. Mimi had passionate kisses and a wedding date. I’d experienced my first kiss. And I had Thad back in my life. It was perfect—too perfect. The perfection of it all made me uneasy somehow. But I scolded myself for feeling this way. There was no sense worrying over nothing.

  Mimi and I hurried inside to tell Blythe, then Emma and Amelie. Blythe was over the moon with excitement, but Emma and Amelie were more subdued in their response.

  I took Emma aside into the hall. “What’s wrong?”

  “We’ve been having bad dreams,” Emma said. “We still think this ship is going to sink.”

  “When?”

  “We don’t know. But we have a dream and we are both underwater, floating. Our skin is blue and our hair floats everywhere around us.”

  “The two of you are there?”

  “We’re not sure. Each of us only sees the other.”

  I scowled, perplexed. “Do you see anyone else?”

  “There are lots of other people floating, but we can’t tell who they are. It’s too dark.”

  I didn’t want to imagine what Emma and Amelie were seeing in their shared nightmare. It was too awful. But I’d had horrible nightmares, too. I’d once dreamed that the evil Dr. Moriarty, Sherlock Holmes’s archenemy, was trying to kill me—and that certainly wasn’t about to happen. Perhaps the twins were simply having a nightmare that sprang from all the talk of the ship sinking.

  I took hold of her hand. “Let’s locate Mr. Stead. I want to know what he thinks of this,” I said, pulling her along.

  We found a steward with a passenger list who directed us to Mr. Stead’s stateroom on D Deck. Before we arrived there, I caught sight of him in the reading and writing room. As we approached him, it was obvious that he was confused by our presence there, though he greeted us cordially.

  We explained the series of events that had brought us onto the ship the day before. “So my question is this: Did you predict the sinking of this ship? And, if so, why did you get on it?” I asked.

  He sighed deeply and frowned. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You wrote a book about it,” Emma said. “Mr. Robertson showed us.”

  “True,” Mr. Stead said. “But at the end of the text, I added a note that said the following: ‘This is exactly what might take place and what will take place if the liners are sent to sea short of boats.’ And, the Titanic is woefully short of lifeboats.”

  “But it’s unsinkable,” I reminded him.

  “That is merely an untested claim,” he said.

  “Did your spirit guide, Julia, tell you the ship would sink?” Emma asked.

  “No. She has been oddly silent on the subject,” he said. “She only told me that I would face a great test.”

  “But you have made other predictions,” Emma reminded him.

  He nodded. “I honestly don’t know if what I wrote was an example of clairvoyance or the working of my logical mind exploring the possible consequence of an overpopulated ocean liner with an insufficient number of lifeboats.”

  “But you doubted your prediction enough to get on the ship,” I pointed out.

  “I thought about it long and hard,” he agreed. “When my ticket came from President Taft for this particular ship, it was as if the time had come for my great test. I sensed it. Perhaps the test is of my faith in the supernatural. Maybe it is in my ability to enact a change for world peace. Either way, I couldn’t say no simply because I was frightened. Not to go to this conference would mean I failed to attempt to work for peace.”

  “You could have taken another ship,” I said.

  “Julia has predicted my death by ice. On the other ship, I might have slipped on a dropped ice cube and hit my head. There is no sense trying to outwit fate.”

  I admired his courage. “My sisters are dreaming they will drown,” I told him.

  “Maybe they will—thirty years from now. Maybe they are simply afraid of the ocean, and this anxiety finds its way into their dreams.”

  I remembered how the twins disliked the ocean. “I think that must be it.”

  After we left Mr. Stead, I sensed that Emma felt better. On her way back, I suggested to her that Amelie might even have gotten upset at the sight of Tesla because some buried childhood memory of the terrifying earthquake had reawakened at the sight of him.

  “That does make sense,” Emma agreed.

 
We would try to put the whole thing out of mind…if we could.

  Chapter 28

  After that, everything became about planning Mimi’s wedding. It was scheduled for Sunday night. It was the only time Captain Smith was available, since he was obligated by tradition to sit with the most elite of the first-class guests during dinner.

  In the next two days, I lost a lot of the animosity I’d felt toward Ninette because she included me in planning the spectacular reception that was to follow Mimi’s wedding ceremony. The ship’s kitchen was already at work preparing a sumptuous dessert buffet and a three-tiered wedding cake.

  On Thursday night, Ninette pulled a straight white crochet dress with a dropped waist from her wardrobe closet and, claiming that she had never worn it, handed it to Mimi, who proclaimed it “Perfect!”

  But Ninette disagreed. “Not nearly good enough. Last night I dined with Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon and his wife, Lucy. Lucy is a dress designer with shops in New York and London. She’s designed for the royal family! I’ll commission her to design new gowns for all of us. She told me she’s got yards and yards of gorgeous fabric in the cargo hold. She’s bringing it to her store in New York, but now it will be all used up by the time she gets there. Oh, well; she can get more. Of course we’ll have to invite Lord and Lady Duff Gordon. You don’t mind, do you, Mimi? They’re not bad company.”

  “The more, the merrier,” Mimi agreed happily. Ninette and Mimi discussed the color and decided on a pale lavender for the bridesmaids, who would be Emma, Amelie, Blythe, and me.

  “Jane, as maid of honor, you’ll need a special dress,” Ninette said.

  I looked to Mimi to check if this was true. She hadn’t mentioned it. Maybe she wanted Ninette to take that spot. “Really?” I asked her.

  “Of course, really,” Mimi said. “You’re my closest sister, aren’t you?”

  My eyes misted up, but I didn’t want to make a big fuss. “Won’t all new dresses cost a fortune?” I asked, quickly wiping my eyes.