Everyone is dressed in Titanic-inspired evening gowns and suits. We, of course, are in all black. When people ask us who we’re dressed up as and Alice tells them that “we’re in mourning for all the passengers who were locked behind gates and never given a chance,” there is an awkward silence, and then they walk away.
Jaxon catches my eye from the drink table. He’s with Dillon, and they’re both laughing so hard that Dillon is wiping at his eyes. I smile at Jaxon and he nods at me.
“Are you positive you’re okay with all this Titanic stuff?” Alice asks, studying my face.
I must look a little emotional. It’s hard to be here and not miss Ada and Mollie, my aunt and uncle, and all the others. To know the fate so many of the passengers suffered, how little chance most of them had of surviving. And yet, I know how lucky I am to have met them at all. “Yeah. I really am okay with it.”
“If you say so,” Alice says, but her tone is doubtful. She’s been by my side all evening. I half think she’s guarding me.
I turn to her. “Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Okay?” There is something quieter about her since this whole thing happened.
She exhales. “Truth? I don’t know. It was a close call, Sam. I didn’t see what you guys saw about Niki and Blair. And I missed Matt entirely.”
“I missed him, too.”
“Yeah, but you had a spell on you not to recognize him. What’s my excuse?”
I shake my head. “Alice, don’t do that.”
“It’s hard not to.”
“I’m serious. Don’t do it. I did that with Vivian. Twisted it through my mind over and over. I hated myself.”
Alice’s eyes are strained, like she wants to believe me but can’t quite.
“And when I couldn’t come to terms with it, I tried to push it away. Bury the whole thing. Vivian, magic, you guys…everything.” I pause. “You were actually the one who helped me stop. Did you know that?”
She lifts a surprised eyebrow. “When I yelled at you?”
“When you told me that I had the opportunity to do something and that I was being selfish.”
“You were.”
I smile. Leave it to Alice to insult me while I’m trying to cheer her up. “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said these past couple of days.”
“About teaching me how to see spirits?” Her icy blue eyes brighten.
“About getting over myself and doing something. When you got that message from your bones, you knew something horrible was coming. You came to me. But I was too stuck in my own head, worrying about my own problems.”
Alice nods in agreement, but not in a judgmental way.
“There I was, watching Matt repeat the injustice of what had happened to all those spirits. Noticing how the accounts we were reading left out Ada and Mollie and so many others. And yet I didn’t understand my role in it. I couldn’t see what you and Redd could see, that something had to be done. And what wound up happening? Matt manipulated me and those spirits for his own agenda. Vivian, Matt. I’m not gonna let that happen again. It’s time for me to make my own decisions about what I do with my magic, about who I want to be.”
“Like helping dead people pass on?”
“Exactly.” I take a good look at Alice. “It’s up to us, isn’t it? That’s what you were trying to tell me that day you yelled at me. It’s up to us to make sure this doesn’t keep happening.”
She smiles. A rare occurrence for her.
Mary bounces up to us, her curls in an elegant updo. “Oh no. Alice is smiling. What’s going on?”
Alice looks happier than I’ve seen her in days. “I think we’re starting a detective agency for the dead.”
Mary’s mouth opens. “I love it! We’ll be like Sherlock Holmes. The hats, the capes, the whole nine.”
I laugh. What did I get myself into?
“And Sam’s going to teach us how to see spirits,” Alice says.
Mary shivers dramatically. “No way. That’s your deal. I’m good not seeing them.”
Across the room an old woman with long salt-and-pepper hair sips tea and stares at me. Redd?
I put down my pear cider. “I’ll be right back.”
I weave through the dancing people, catching glimpses of her as I go. Just as I reach the edge of the crowd, she raises her eyebrows at me and blinks out.
I do a three-sixty, but she’s gone. Maybe I’ll start with Redd. Help her finish what she needs to so she can move on. That’s the least I owe her for what she did for me.
I turn back around. Elijah is standing in a shadowed corner watching me.
“You know, I found a lilac on my bedside table this morning,” I say, moving closer to him.
He’s in a suit with his hair combed. It’s unfair how attractive he is. “There is no scent in all the world more alluring.” He offers me his hand. “May I have the pleasure?”
I slip my hand into his. “You may.”
He wraps his arm around my body. I move slowly in rhythm with him, my face tilted up toward his.
“Elijah, do you ever think about the spell Vivian did that almost brought you back to life?”
“Every day,” he says, and pulls me closer.
In my peripheral vision I can see people stopping to watch me dance with thin air. And I couldn’t care less. This is who I am.
The Titanic letter that appears in Haunting the Deep has a fascinating story of its own, involving a long line of remarkable women from my family tree. It starts way back with my great-great-great-grandmother Maria (pronounced muh-RYE-uh) DeLong Haxtun, to whom the letter was written.
I’ve been able to track so many of my ancestors’ adventures through Maria’s robust and frequent correspondence—as far as I understand, she was quite the favorite in my family. (And I’ve got to say, reading all that gorgeous cursive makes me a little weepy that no one writes longhand anymore.) Maria received the letter recounting the fate of Myra Haxtun Harper and Henry Sleeper Harper—her cousins—shortly after the Titanic sank and the Harpers returned home safely. In addition to the Titanic letter, Maria also had a picture of Henry Harper in her possession.
Maria’s granddaughter—my great-grandmother—Adrianna Storm Haxtun Mather (I am proud to be named after her!) preserved Henry’s picture, the Titanic letter, and many newspaper clippings from 1912 related to the sinking. Adrianna was a teacher and an amateur historian, and labeled all the family heirlooms she collected over the years with notecards (hence the mention of notecards in this book and in How to Hang a Witch). The handwriting on the envelope containing the Titanic letter is hers, and so are the notes below Henry Harper’s picture.
This personal slice of Titanic history might have lingered in a box somewhere collecting dust, except that my grandmother Claire Mather had the foresight to pass on all the family stories. When I was a little girl, she held my hand and talked me through the many heirlooms that had fallen into her care, breathing life into old portraits and Victorian wedding dresses stashed in trunks. Romance, intrigue, and grandiose apology presents were all well represented.
The funny thing is, there is so much history in my grandparents’ home that you are just as likely to find a curious diary from the 1700s in the back of a button drawer as anywhere else. In fact, the Titanic letter was nestled among a stack of other old letters and newspapers in a desk. There was nothing to indicate that it was special besides the word “Titanic” written on a manila envelope. When I first stumbled across it, I thought, “No, not that Titanic. Couldn’t be.”
Also odd (or maybe kismet!) was that I discovered the letter right after Random House acquired How to Hang a Witch. Here I was with my first book deal and a letter about Henry Sleeper Harper’s brush with the Titanic—the same Henry who was the director of Harper & Brothers publishing house before it became HarperCollins. It seemed obvious to me that the next book I wrote should be about this letter and the incredible women who preserved it and handed it down through the generati
ons.
Myra and Henry didn’t do interviews after the Titanic sank, and as far as I know, this is one of the only written records of what happened to them that night in 1912. They were unbelievably lucky in that they both survived, along with Hammad Hassab, who was in their employ, and their dog. Their survival was likely only possible because Myra saw the iceberg scrape past her porthole and realized the danger. She quickly woke her husband, and their entire party was able to board one of the first lifeboats.
As it turns out, in the moments after the ship struck the iceberg, many passengers were nervous about getting into the lifeboats. They were being told to trade an enormous, luxurious steamer that they believed was unsinkable for a tiny boat that would be lowered by rickety ropes fifty feet into icy black water. Even when the threat of sinking became more obvious, there were a number of people who needed to be coaxed or pushed into those lifeboats. Perhaps because of this reluctance early on in the boarding process, the crew allowed a few men to accompany their wives. Henry was ill at the time, and it’s possible that his weakened state, combined with the aforementioned hesitancy, played a role in his and Hammad’s survival.
The more I thought about Myra and Henry’s personal story and how they narrowly survived, the more I thought about people’s survival in general. The passengers and crew on the Titanic came from all over the world and were from vastly different backgrounds. When Captain Smith realized the boat would likely sink in little more than two hours, he ordered the sixteen lifeboats filled with passengers and lowered into the ocean. The crew and company men knew that fewer than half of the people on board would fit into those boats. They had to make choices about whom to save, which resulted in the “women and children first” rule and was ultimately focused on those in first and second class. The passengers also made decisions, some supposedly fighting for spots, and others giving up their seats.
Manuel Uruchurtu, a lawyer from Mexico who made an appearance in this book, has one such story. He was seated in Lifeboat Eleven when a woman he didn’t know pleaded to be let in because her husband and child were awaiting her in New York. He gave up his seat, only asking that she visit his wife and seven children in Xalapa, Veracruz. Manuel died, but she lived because of his generosity, and twelve years later, she visited his wife in Veracruz and recounted the tale.
Another group that made a huge sacrifice were the ship’s coal workers. The on-duty men in the boiler rooms were the reason the lights stayed on until the Titanic’s final moments; they shoveled coal into the boilers with little or no hope for their own survival. It’s also likely that the off-duty coal workers and engineers assisted the pump operations, selflessly giving others more time to board the lifeboats.
There are so many heartbreaking stories of loss and kindness that it’s impossible to tell them all in a fictional narrative. Not to mention the crew and passengers whose stories weren’t recorded and are lost to us forever. This was something I really struggled with when I first started this book. I knew I couldn’t do justice to all the people I wanted to mention with the space I had. And the more research I did, the more I discovered how many people weren’t given the chance even to fight to survive. Nora, Mollie, and Ada are only a few of these. So in lieu of being able to honor them all, I aimed to highlight the mechanism of social privilege that played a part in who was given priority in the evacuation, and who was not. The working class, the immigrants, those whose cries for help went unanswered, make up the vast majority of the Titanic’s victims. And it’s a social construct that still exists around the world—the privileged receive opportunities that the marginalized do not. While I can’t go back in time and be a voice for the people who were lost the night the Titanic sank, we can all speak up now.
In the beginning, there was My Pirate, James Bird, who stamped around, shaking his hands in the air and yelling, “That’s not a plot! Get a plot and we’ll talk.” And then patiently encouraged me to revise it as many times as necessary. He makes me better, he listens, and he never stops believing in me.
Then came my wonderful mama, Sandra Mather, who supplied me with cookies and whose pride overfloweth at all my ideas, even the cockamamie ones. As long as she is in the world, I know that I have a safe place filled with love, fluffy pillows, and hot chocolate.
My grandparents Frank and Claire Mather taught me my history, and encouraged me when I decided to write wild stories about it. They are my inspiration and my heart. I couldn’t do this without them. I only wish my father, Frank Haxtun Mather Jr., who loved our family history as much as I do, were here to see these books.
My agent, Rosemary Stimola, gently guided me toward skilled editors (yes, plural), who she knew, after many hours of labor and many pots of coffee, would be able to help. I am grateful every day that I get to spend with this fierce, loving, honest woman.
My editor Nancy Hinkel eased me, with great finesse, into paring down my prittle-prattle and replacing it with common sense. Her kindness and wisdom were a light in a storm.
And my editor Melanie Nolan, or rather my editor-detective, beautifully cracked the mystery of my plot and made it shine. She is artful with clues and such a joy. I’m her biggest fan.
My critique partners—Kerry Kletter, Kali Wallace, Jeff Zentner, and Audrey Coulthurst. They didn’t stop talking to me after they read my first draft, they pushed me forward when I needed a push, and they are just the absolute best writing friends anyone could have. And Anya Remizova, who listened to me babble on endlessly about my stories and was always there for me.
My large and wonderful family—you all are so incredibly special to me and you never hesitate when I need you. You encourage my ideas and my chocolate habit, and boost my spirit. I could not and would not want to do any of this without you.
Alison Impey and Regina Flath hit a home run with the cover design. I am in awe of you both.
In fact, the entire team at Random House, who support my books in the most remarkable ways, never cease to bring a huge smile to my face. Barbara Marcus, you should have your own superhero character. Mary McCue, you deserve a tropical vacation for all the hours you’ve spent getting me in front of a microphone (which you also know needs to be pried from my sticky fingers once I get ahold of it). Kim Lauber and Hannah Black, without your brilliance in dressing up every bit of me, I’m sure I would be the emperor without clothes. Kate Keating and Cayla Rasi, you make me squeal like a schoolgirl with your awesome ideas. Adrienne Waintraub, Laura Antonacci, and Lisa Nadel, you represent the message and meaning of my stories, and I will always be grateful for that. Artie Bennett, Alison Kolani, and Iris Broudy, your amazing, detail-oriented minds are the finishing bow that makes all the difference. John Adamo, Dominique Cimina, Judith Haut, Trish Parcell, Aaron Blank, Rebecca Waugh, Katherine Punia, Jodie Cohen, and Emily Parliman, thank you for all the wonderful you bring to each of my books.
Clementine Gaisman, every time you pop into my inbox you bring a little piece of magic with you.
In all seriousness, every single person mentioned here and so many more are the beating heart of my stories. You mean the world to me, and I’m thankful every morning I wake up and realize that it’s not all a dream. You make it possible for me to do what I love and have therefore given me one of the greatest gifts of my life…to freely be who I am. Thank you. THANK YOU.
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
* * *
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.
: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share
Haunting the Deep Page 27
