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

by Suzanne Weyn

  Once again Blythe dissolved into deep, pain-racked sobbing. “I pleaded with the lifeboat captain to go back to look for them. I begged and begged, but he wouldn’t. He said it was too dangerous. He said if I didn’t calm down, he’d knock me out. Really, Jane, I tried all I could.”

  I put my arms around her and together we rocked as tears ran down my cheeks. “Shh. Shh. You did all you could. No one could have done better.”

  “Do you really think so?” she asked through her tears.

  “Yes! I know you did.”

  Shutting my eyes, I let the tears fall, not even trying to control them.

  Blythe and I sat there holding on to each other for a long time. Finally, I realized she’d fallen asleep on my tear-drenched shoulder.

  I settled her onto the cot at Amelie’s feet and covered her with a blanket. Then I went out on deck to search once more for Thad and Mimi. I hoped with all my heart that they’d been rescued. The intensity of my need to find them was so strong I felt as though I could almost will them to appear.

  People from all the different classes sat mixed together out on the deck. The Carpathia, I learned, had picked up 750 passengers. Fifteen hundred other passengers and crew members had died.

  Fifteen hundred souls lost!

  Revised lists of who had lived and who had died were going up hourly as bodies were retrieved by the Californian, which had shown up much too late to be of help to anyone.

  Thad and Mimi were, as yet, unaccounted for, and so I continued to search. I hoped maybe they were passed out, like Amelie, and no one had identified them. I read a story once where a person was hit on the head and had forgotten his own identity; amnesia, I think they called it. I let my inventive mind work overtime to come up with stories in which they survived.

  I came upon Juliette LaRoche sitting on a deck chair, holding both Simone and Louise as she stared out at the ocean. I’d learned from Blythe that she already knew her husband, Joseph, was dead. The pain in her eyes was heartbreaking to see. “Blythe is sleeping,” I told her. “Can I help you in her place?”

  She smiled sadly. “No, thank you. I have lost the best husband on earth. No one can help me.”

  Tesla came by and saw me with Juliette. For a moment I looked at him hopefully, but his expression told me there was no need to even ask if he’d seen Mimi or Thad.

  Louise started to whimper, and Juliette went to find the girls something to eat. I got up and walked the deck with Tesla.

  “I never dreamed it would turn out like this,” he said. “I will never be able to forgive myself.”

  “Thad and I are the only ones left who know what really happened,” I said.

  “Then you must tell,” he said.

  I shook my head. “The man who tampered with your earthquake machine is to blame. And I think he must be dead. I haven’t seen him anywhere, and we’ll never know who he was working for.”

  Mother met us at New York Harbor, having gotten onto another ship almost immediately after the Titanic sailed. Her face looked like it was permanently swollen from days of relentless crying. She had contacted the White Star Line and learned of Emma’s death and Amelie’s condition. She knew Blythe and I were safe and Mimi was missing.

  When Blythe and I came down the gangplank, she rushed to us through the waiting crowd, gathering us both in her arms. Her emotional tears, at once happy and tortured, set Blythe and me off in a matching torrent yet again.

  “And Mimi?” she asked. “Anything?”

  I shook my head and a stricken cry came from her like I’ve never heard. It was as though someone were choking her while she screamed. And then she swooned. A man nearby steadied her gently to the ground. In moments, she regained consciousness but dropped her head into her hands. “I don’t know how I can go on,” she murmured.

  Amelie was brought to Saint Vincent’s Hospital. We stayed with her around the clock, performing all the duties required to keep her fed and clean.

  “Mr. Stead was right; he died by ice,” Mother said as she and I sat around Amelie’s curtained-off bed with the amber lights turned down low, while Blythe slept curled in an armchair nearby. It was late and most people were asleep.

  “I heard he was very dignified,” I told her. “They say he went to the ship’s library with Colonel Astor, where they sat together and waited for the end.”

  “He was a dear friend,” Mother remarked.

  “Mother? Jane?”

  Mother and I both looked up quickly to Amelie.

  Had she spoken?

  “Mother?”

  We sprang to her. “Amelie! We’re here, darling,” Mother said excitedly. “How do you feel?”

  “My mouth is dry. What happened? Where am I?”

  “We’ll tell you everything later,” Mother said, no doubt not wanting to upset her. “You’re talking, dear.”

  “Emma is talking.”

  Mother and I looked at each other, shocked.

  “You know about Emma?” I asked cautiously.

  “I am Emma.”

  Mother gasped. “I know the difference between them,” she said to me. “I’ve always been able to tell them apart. That is Amelie.”

  “Amelie is here, too,” she said.

  Blythe had awakened and quietly come to the foot of the bed, watching. “That’s Emma’s voice,” she whispered.

  “Emma said she wouldn’t leave,” I recalled softly.

  “I haven’t,” Amelie said.

  Chapter 35

  Back in Spirit Vale, we had a memorial service for Emma, even though she was very much with us. We had another one for Mimi. Although we had no body, she was presumed to have drowned.

  Mother took down her sign and announced that she was done contacting spirits. “While that ship was sinking, the spirit world overwhelmed me with messages and warnings. At one point I was so frantic that I tried to jump overboard to swim to you. The ship’s captain finally had me sedated. I never want to go through anything like that again.”

  Instead, she went back to working for Aunty Lily at the hotel, keeping books and managing things.

  Another sign went up in front of our house, though. Amelie changed her name to Amelie-Em and became one of the most sought-after psychics in western New York. With the force of their combined personalities, Amelie-Em was a vibrant, forceful woman, not at all the fey, winsome girls they had once been. In fact, she became the force in Spirit Vale, much as Mother had been before them.

  It seems strange to refer to one person as them, but that’s how we all came to think of Amelie-Em, almost as if they were Siamese twins attached at some psychic intersection of their metaphysical selves.

  I grieved deeply for Mimi and Thad. Every day I had to remind myself that they were really gone, because, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t believe it. I constantly spoke to them both in my mind. I even imagined that I heard answers, though I suppose I was only imagining what they might say. If I ever told myself I had to let go of them, the pain was crippling and I couldn’t do it.

  Mimi had been my dearest friend. Thad was my greatest love. How could they be dead? It was too cruel. I couldn’t bear it. Most of my days were spent in my room, crying. My only pleasure was sleep because there I could see them in dreams so vivid they were like visits in another time and place.

  I never stopped feeling their loss, but in May I got word that my article on Tesla had won me the internship at the Sun. Mother did not immediately agree to let me go. But I desperately needed to get out of Spirit Vale, where everything reminded me of Mimi. In the end, my relentless pleading wore her down and she consented.

  “Take me with you,” Blythe pleaded.

  I couldn’t, though I promised she could visit often.

  Everything about working for the Sun was thrilling. Well, maybe the work was less than stimulating. I read endless reams of copy, checking for typographic errors like missed commas. I sometimes aided the art department in inserting small type that had been missed in the first go ’round. I o
ften returned to my room in a town house owned by an el derly couple in the West Twenties with ink on my hands and face. To get there, I had to pass a building with black-gated windows and a black wrought-iron fence that was the Astor Counting House. Every time I went by, the pain of the previous April came back to me anew. I soon found a new way to go.

  One evening I went down to Chinatown to see Li in her father’s restaurant. I got to the front door but stopped before going in. I hadn’t realized this was the same place I’d eaten with Thad. I clamped a handkerchief to my face to soak up the rush of tears as I hurried away. That night I cried myself to sleep, curled in a ball in my small room.

  Those six months were a time of bitter loneliness for me. I spent my days alone in the museums and reading. I had finished every Sherlock Holmes adventure and so began reading them over again beginning with “A Scandal in Bohemia,” the very first, written in 1891. It surprised me how my perception of Holmes had changed since I first encountered him. Where I had once thought him to be a god of dispassionate reason, someone I should emulate, I now saw his very human flaws. He was moody and irritable. He had no friends other than the understanding Dr. Watson. Even his fervid attention to detail began to strike me as abnormal.

  I kept reading the newspapers, too. There was a hearing held in the Waldorf-Astoria to determine what had gone wrong with the Titanic. A panel declared it had been too large a ship with too small a rudder. There was no mention of the crack in the rudder. I wondered if they ever even knew about it.

  One day I came upon an article written by George Bernard Shaw in a paper called the Daily News and Leader claiming that the heroism of the people on the Titanic had been exaggerated and romanticized. I was outraged! I remembered seeing the playwright outside Stead’s rented town house and recalling he was supposed to have been a good friend of his.

  A day or two later I came upon a rebuttal written by none other than dear Dr. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. He said, “It is a pitiful sight to see a man of undoubted genius using his gifts in order to misrepresent and decry his own people.” He was Stead’s real friend, and I thought more highly of him than ever I had before.

  I also kept clipping accounts of Tesla and the rumblings of war in Europe.

  That year, Tesla had more money worries. His creditors at Wardenclyffe Tower were demanding their money back. With Colonel Astor gone, Mr. Boldt demanded twenty thousand dollars in back rent. Tesla sold him the scrap metal from the tower to pay his debt. Eventually Tesla was forced to move out of his beloved Waldorf-Astoria. I had no idea where he was living.

  Tesla was nominated for the Nobel Prize in science that year for his work with high-frequency resonant transformers, but when he heard he would have to share the award with Edison, he said he wouldn’t accept the nomination. He could have certainly used the money from that award, but once again he was too principled to compromise.

  When the time came for my internship to end, my editor asked if I’d like to stay on as a paid assistant. I jumped at the chance. The couple I was staying with said I could stay on if I started paying rent, and I agreed.

  That would have been the rest of my life.

  But then, something remarkable happened.

  Chapter 36

  NEW YORK CITY, AUGUST 1914

  I worked at the paper for the next two years getting more and better assignments. By the time I was nineteen, I was reviewing theatrical events for the paper. This was a lot of fun, although I begged my editor ceaselessly to allow me to cover more substantial news stories.

  One story I was dying to be assigned was a piece on the quarrel between Dr. Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini. They had been friends at the time of the conference in London, and now they were the bitterest enemies. Dr. Conan Doyle was a leading champion of spiritualism, while Houdini remained its most vocal disbeliever. Conan Doyle publicly claimed that Houdini was in fact a psychic who did his amazing feats by means of metaphysics.

  I pleaded to interview them both for the paper and was told that maybe, if they both came to New York at the same time, I could interview them.

  The other topic I wanted to write about was the one on everyone’s mind—the war.

  The conflict that Mr. Stead had been so worried about had erupted. In June there had been an assassination in the city of Sarajevo—a twenty-year-old Yugoslavian shot the Austrian archduke and archduchess. Because of this, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia in July. Then Russia got into it, siding with Serbia, and France joined them. Germany came to the aid of its ally, Austria-Hungary. Britain got into it to side with France and then Japan honored its alliance with England and came on board. It was just as Stead had predicted—a world at war.

  I read that Arthur Conan Doyle, although fifty-five, joined the Crowborough Company of the Sixth Royal Sussex Volunteer Regiment and served as a private. I recalled Amelie-Em’s prediction and wondered if he had signed up to be with his son, Kingsley Conan Doyle, who had joined the British Army.

  The United States was still not involved in the war, though some political columnists at the paper said it was only a matter of time until we were. Germany had already accused the United States of sending England war supplies—an accusation that was probably true. They threatened to torpedo any of our ships found in British waters. Sinking ships was something I didn’t even want to think about.

  “How can I cover entertainment when so much is going on?” I complained to my editor one evening after filing a particularly insipid article about a doggie fashion show at Madison Square Garden.

  As I spoke, an assistant came in and dropped a paper on his desk. As I rambled on about how silly and boring such events were, my editor ignored me and read the paper. “Would you look at that, Jane?” he said, putting down the typed article so I could see it. “Those Germans are going to force us into this infernal war one way or the other. A naval ship just picked up a man and a woman floating off the coast of Nova Scotia—right in the middle of the ocean without a boat or anything in sight. They think they’re spies, and the Germans knew our guys would pick them up. How dumb do they think we are?”

  He kept talking, but I was no longer listening. My eyes were glued to the photographs accompanying the story. Both the young man and the woman were wringing wet.

  The woman had long, thick, jet-black hair.

  Someone had blackened both the eyes of the young man.

  “What is it, Jane?” my editor asked, noticing my stunned expression. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Maybe,” I said quietly, and then I exploded into action, nearly throwing myself across his large desk. “You have to let me go to Nova Scotia to cover this story. You must!”

  “Well,” he considered tentatively, “I don’t have anyone else I can spare right now and since you’re so bent on—”

  “Thank you!” I cried.

  He handed me the sheet of paper. “All the information is here. See accounting for some expense money and you can leave in the morning.”

  “I’m leaving right now! Right now, tonight!”

  Was it possible?

  Chapter 37

  My train has pulled into the station and I am now writing in a motorcar on the way to the Halifax Police Station where the prisoners are being held. My heart is beating so hard I have to stop to take deep breaths to calm myself.

  I think I know what might have happened. I hope so, at least.

  Tesla’s time-travel device threw him and me two hours and forty minutes into the future. For some reason, it sent Thad and Mimi two years and four months forward in time.

  I hope I am right.

  Am I just wishing, making up more stories in my head?

  Please, let me be right.

  I am now sitting on a bench at the police station waiting. The wait is endless.

  Footsteps approach.

  I am shaking.

  Mimi bursts into tears when she sees me. She is dressed in dry clothes but her wrinkled white wedding gown is draped over her arm. “I don’t
know what’s happened, Jane. I’m so confused,” she says. “What happened to the ship?”

  I weep with joy. “Mimi! Mimi!” I gush as I hug her tight.

  “Jane, you look different,” Mimi observes, stepping out of my embrace, twirling a long strand of her loose, unbundled hair. “You look older, somehow. What’s happened?”

  “I’ll tell you everything on the way home,” I promise, throwing my arms around her again.

  Thad steps into the room, his eyes still swollen purple, an expression of complete confusion on his face. But when he sees me, his face shines with joy.

  “Jane, you’re alive!” he shouts, taking me into his arms. He sweeps me into a passionate kiss. I am too happy to bother caring that we are in a very public place.

  I am in his arms. He is back.

  For me, years have passed. For Mimi and Thad, only minutes. It is too great to be true. Yet it is true. I turn to the policeman in the corner. “I’m not dreaming, am I?” I check.

  “No, miss,” he assures me.

  Now we are on a train traveling back to New York. Mimi is very quiet, deeply sad to learn that Victor is dead. I have told her how Emma seems to be with us still, and that seems to console her in some way.

  They are not a day older than that terrible night in 1912. Their time in the water was brief, so their health is good. The authorities have grilled them with questions and have decided that they are not spies, after all. Though, when asked, I could offer no plausible explanation of how they came to be there, the fact that I knew them and could vouch for them as Americans facilitated their release.

  “Victor said he would take me to Haiti,” Mimi mentions. “Maybe I’ll plan a trip there myself. Would you come with me, Jane?”

  “Yes, of course, I will,” I assure her.

  Thad holds my hand and I point out to him that we are now nearly the same age, and he smiles. He puts his arm around me as I snuggle close.

  As the train rumbles on, I think of Tesla saying that we are all inevitably traveling into the future—a future full of doubt and uncertainty. I remember also what Mr. Stead said that morning in the study—that the things we do can change the future.