by Richard Peck
“I couldn’t say,” I answered.
“When she returns, put her life preserver on her as I have done yours.” Then she stopped in the doorway and looked back. “Put on a warm coat over the preserver. And you might go to Mr. McElroy and get Miss Whitwell’s jewelry, if it is in his care.”
My fitted gray wool coat would not go over the cork vest. I went without it, my faded nightgown billowing beneath the vest, into the crowded corridor. Most people either wore their life preservers or were struggling with them. Several who had perhaps drunk too much were laughing. Others had not been persuaded to don anything that would spoil the lines of their dinner clothes.
There was a mob scene on C deck around the purser’s counter when I got there. Mr. McElroy was handing over the jewelry as quickly as possible. He gave me Miss Amanda’s in an untidy mound, and I bore it away, terrified that I would drop something.
I managed to make my way back up to B deck against the tide of people surging along the corridor. At my cabin door, I saw the Ryerson family. Mr. Ryerson was leading his wife, a son of perhaps twelve or thirteen, their two daughters, their governess, and Victorine. She alone was without a life preserver.
She dropped behind and clutched my arm. “Your young lady, do you know where she is?”
I shook my head.
“Then let us hope she finds herself protected by a gentleman who knows the meaning of chivalry.”
“Are we in real danger?” I whispered.
“We are told to be tranquil, and yet it is said the mailbags are floating in the hold. The stokers have forsaken the furnaces and are swarming upward,” she replied. “We are in the hands of God.” Then she hurried away.
Miss Amanda’s stateroom was as I had left it. She had not come for her life preserver, and I knew in my heart where she was. She would have made it her business to be in Mr. Sawyer’s bed by now. I lingered, thinking the room made a safer refuge than the teeming corridors. The lamps still blazed, yet the whole unsinkable ship was standing at a frightening angle. Perhaps I still waited there, the jewelry in my hands, because these were the last moments of my servitude.
The stewardess appeared again in the doorway. “What? Not gone already? Everybody up on deck. Ladies in the lifeboats on the port side!”
Panic was growing in me. I let the jewelry fall in a scatter across the dressing table. Then, without thought of a warm wrap, I bolted out the door.
A band of steerage passengers, their faces strained, were being led along by a crew member. I noticed that the men’s boots were gushing water and the women’s skirts were wet to the knees.
We were led up to A deck, where I found a group of first-class passengers and servants, including the Ryersons and Victorine. We waited for a lifeboat to be lowered. But the windows were closed, and after a considerable time we were led up another flight to the boat deck. The higher we climbed, the more deafening was the noise. The shriek of escaping steam. The ship itself was screaming.
On the open deck the air was freezing. My eyes teared, but I struggled to make sense of the scene. Forward were the davits for four lifeboats. One, perhaps two, of the boats were gone. The figures crowding around those that remained were families, but they were parting, or being parted. Mrs. Ryerson’s hands reached out in an effort to gather in all her children. Mr. Ryerson had removed his life preserver and was urging it on the protesting Victorine. No, no, she was mouthing, but he wrapped it hastily around her.
We waited again, listening to the men in our group murmuring among themselves. I eyed the lifeboats, those wooden hulls that would be like walnut shells on the ocean so far below. I saw the young Mrs. Marvin, who had traveled down in the boat train in our compartment, clinging to her new husband. His lips moved, reassuring her perhaps. He pointed down the ship to another group of lifeboats. At last she allowed him to propel her toward the boats.
Now came word that the windows on the A deck had been opened, and once again we descended the stairway. At last, using deck chairs as steps, the passengers were urged to board the lifeboat through the open windows. Mrs. Ryerson’s two daughters were already in the boat. A crewman was urging her to follow, but she held her young son’s shoulders. Clearly, she would not leave him behind. She clasped him to her and turned her face away from the open boat where her other children waited. Mr. Ryerson spoke to a ship’s officer, pleading with him. At last the boy was allowed to go with his mother. But after that the officer boomed, “No more boys!”
Behind me I heard Miss Reed’s voice. “No, I’d sooner take my chances with the ship.” She was being pulled along by two gentlemen to the windows. But there she balked. A crewman standing beside her tore an object from her hands and hurled it into the lifeboat. Howling in outrage, Miss Reed dived into the boat. Then I realized the object thrown was her “lucky” toy pig.
I heard a man say, “Room for more ladies in this boat,” and I drew back. I could not go. I could only turn and bolt back to the warmth of the glowing ship.
My mind was numbed by cold and fear. But I knew then what I was doing. I could not remember that I hated Amanda Whitwell. It occurred to me that she would die. Perhaps we both would die. But if I lived and she did not, I couldn’t have the burden on my conscience that she had been on my life. I raced to find her.
I had nearly reached the end of B corridor when a steward loomed up from nowhere. “Here now, you oughtn’t to be down here!” He caught my arm to turn me back.
“Tell me where Mr. Sawyer’s stateroom is,” I said. “Please, I have to know!”
He spoke in a husky whisper. “Well, miss, I’ll tell you the truth. But then you must promise to go.”
At my nod, he took my hand and led me to a narrow stairwell. As we stood at the top of a flight, he said, “I’m the steward for Mr. Sawyer’s stateroom, miss. It was down on C deck.”
“Was?” I said.
“Look down, miss.”
At the bottom, black water lapped at the stairs. “Mr. Sawyer’s stateroom is underwater, miss. Has been this past quarter hour.”
I couldn’t believe the greater part of the ship was dead already—I couldn’t believe what my mind’s eye saw: Miss Amanda lying trapped against the ceiling of a room, a death trap swirling to the top with freezing water—her hair, hair like mine, turned to a seaweed’s tendrils. And here I stood a few feet away, dry-shod still. It couldn’t be. And yet I knew it was.
Down the tilting corridor I ran, my mind oddly clear. I knew what I must do now. I must live. Whoever I was, whatever I had been, wherever I was going—I must live.
I rushed to Miss Amanda’s stateroom. In the steamer trunk I found a fur-trimmed wrap, wadded with her other things. How flimsy the wrap looked as I threw it over my vest and tied its silken cord at my neck. I turned to the treasure on the dressing table. Diamond bracelets, a brooch, a pendant. The necklace of pearls. I snatched up the pearls and wound them around my neck, stuffing the end of the loop into my life preserver. Then the circle of gold set with an enormous diamond. I jammed it onto the finger that had once worn John Thorne’s ring. This engagement ring and the pearls—these must be saved, for they were Mr. Forrest’s gifts.
The lamps flickered and dimmed. My hair whipped madly about my face as I fled. I ran toward music. Yes, the ship’s orchestra still played—a lively ragtime tune. It pulled me on toward the grand staircase. But the steps pitched backward. They seemed to lead nowhere. But I leaped at them, fell, crawled up to the landing, and on up to A deck.
People were clustering at the rail, women and men, waiting. They cried out as a boat from the open deck above, teeming with people, began descending in fits and starts. Would it stop for them? It made no stop, but lowered quickly past their horrified gaze.
Then a man broke from the shadows and darted through the crowd. He leaped like a monkey onto the rail, hands and feet drawn together, and soared out into space, flinging himself down onto the heads of those in the lifeboat.
I ran back into the ship, across the foyer to the
starboard side, and stepped up to the rail. A lifeboat was settling into the flat oil-stained sea below. When I looked up, I saw the davits on this side of the boat deck were all empty.
The ship shuddered and the hiss of steam ceased. Over the chorus of hundreds of far-off voices crying out, I heard music again, a mournful, stately melody now that broke as I listened, notes scattered to the wind.
The ship began to slide. It shook, and there were explosions deep within it. Boilers giving way, perhaps. Or the collapse of kitchen crockery. Or the great crystal chandeliers thundering down on parquet floors. The Titanic, her stern standing high out of the water, was sliding into the sea.
The water rose to meet me. I threw a leg over the rail and balanced there, watching the strange, rolling waterfall that surged beside the ship’s hull. I was not six feet above it. I leaped out into the maelstrom, and the water’s first icy blow knocked me senseless and stopped my breath.
I was drawn down, down below the rushing surface until the cork vest, bobbing upward, carried me with it. Suddenly my head broke the surface, and I saw the ship still making its slide into the blackness, its stern swarming with people. One of the great funnels buckled and fell into the water with a hard slap. I was thrust backward by the shock wave, thrust clear of the suction that dragged the other swimmers down.
There was no feeling in my hands and feet. But I had to move. I couldn’t die by inches in this way—freezing in the act of drowning. But my soaked hair drew my face down, and the knot of silk cord at my neck combined with the necklace of pearls to close my throat. Lower and lower I was drawn, like a starfish caught in a whirlpool.
The pain in my arms to the elbows told me I wasn’t quite helpless. And I swam, I flailed, I struggled through the water.
For how long? An hour—two? No, it couldn’t have been more than five minutes. But I could have slept then, easily and forever, except one last urge grew within me. I thrust myself up for one last swallow of freezing air, and my skull seemed to splinter against some hard, unyielding object.
My hands grappled upward and found the solid wood of a board set just above the lapping waves. I managed to cling there and struggle for a better hold.
It was an airless place, under that narrow plank, stuffy and freezing and black as a pocket. I was in some enclosure and could hear the rumbling sound of men’s boots and men’s voices. They were somewhere just above me and the thing I clung to. I was neither alone nor dead. But where was I?
The heel of my hand worked down the curving wall to the waterline and then beneath it. There below the water I felt its lower edge. I ducked my head again beneath the surface and followed around the wooden lip that floated half in and half out of the sea.
The cork vest buoyed me suddenly upward and I was in open sea again. I had surfaced beneath an overturned lifeboat. The plank had been a seat stretched across the boat’s midsection. Now I was clinging to the outer hull. And just above my face were the boots of a dozen men—perhaps more—standing on the overturned boat’s curving underside. And there were others in the water, struggling toward us. Some cried out, “Save one life! Save one life!”
I held on to the boat’s edge, my head so near that those standing above me, swaying back and forth on bending knees to keep the shell on an even keel, couldn’t see me at first. I clung there, knowing I couldn’t live long in this water, while the men above me moaned low in their throats. I took them for stokers who had escaped somehow from the furnace room and coal hole.
The sea was a black expanse now, as if the ship had never been. But then a man’s head suddenly surfaced beyond the end of the boat. He threw up an arm and shouted. One of the men above me roared, “Get away! Get away! You’ll swamp us, you fool!” But the man in the water was no threat to them. His hand fell away, and I saw nothing more of him.
My hand crept along the overlapping planks of the hull. But I could do no more. And then I clutched the toe of a stoker’s boot.
He jerked his foot away, and the boat wobbled crazily. “Get off, get off, you bleeding leech. I’ll deal with you!”
He was wielding an oar. At the risk of his own balance, he swung it in an arc like a pendulum to sweep me away. The oar caught me full in the face, seeming to crush my cheekbone. I floated free then, pinwheels of pale lightning in my brain.
Then another voice. “My God. It’s a woman!”
“Can’t be,” came another voice. Did they all have oars to beat me away from their refuge?
But then they were drawing me out of the water. “We’re all but capsized,” came a voice, “and for what? To bring another corpse aboard?”
No, I tried to cry, no, I am not dead. Don’t roll me off! But I could only moan. It was enough, though. And I was left to lie across the lifeboat’s keel.
All the cries from the water had ceased now. It would have been absolutely still if the men above me, braced against the swell of the sea, had not begun to pray. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death . . .” Then my mind slipped away, into deeper darkness.
I awoke to shouts, remembering nothing. The world had gone from black to gray. Hands grasped my body. I felt myself drawn over the keel and lifted into another lifeboat.
“Make room here,” a woman’s voice said. “Lay her across my knees.” I heard a gasp. “Oh, dear Lord, don’t look at her face!”
I felt my hands being taken and briskly massaged. Then a light touch at my neck felt for a pulse. “Look!” said the woman’s voice. “Those pearls. It’s Amanda Whitwell.”
AMANDA SPEAKS
9
I lay there, still not quite knowing.
The pain crept back now, and one of my eyes was swollen shut. Each time I came near waking, the day was brighter. At last the world was suffused with rosy light. But the talk, the cries—all were meaningless to me. I lay cradled in pain and waited until I could understand the riddle, the puzzle of words I had heard when I was handed into this boat.
Hands clutched me. A great ship loomed high above us. I could only wonder how it came to be there. How could any ship find this scatter of drifting lifeboats in the corpse-strewn sea? But our little boat rocked and nestled like a tug against this great ship’s hull.
A ladder came down—ropes with wooden steps between. I was being held up, and hands ran ropes beneath my arms, around my body. I began to rise. Ocean and sky spread limitless in every direction. Icebergs, great shadowless structures, littered the sea.
Hands reached for me and drew me into the ship. I thought of Jonah, safe in his whale. They laid me gently on a floor unbelievably flat and solid, and I was sickened with the steadiness. The pearls rattled against the hard deck.
“She’s very far gone,” a voice said.
I wore Miss Amanda’s wrap, her pearls, the ring Mr. Forrest had pledged his future with. I even wore my young lady’s cast-off nightgown. And in this first confusion I was mistaken for Amanda Whitwell. My mind tried to embrace this fact.
This had happened before—when John Thorne had seized me that dark night. But now my own mother would not know me. My face was a bruised pulp. With the only eye I had any vision in, I could see my own cheek, swollen to grotesque size. The jewelry, of course, marked me as Miss Amanda. But that was a mistake. I could put it right at once.
I tried to speak. But I couldn’t. I am Miranda Cooke, I said to whoever was there. No, Miranda Thorne. But no sound came. Perhaps I did not will it enough.
I was carried on a litter into a stateroom. It wasn’t the sort of place where I should be quartered, and I tried to tell them. But someone bent over me and said, “It is a miracle! Mademoiselle Whitwell has saved herself!” It was Victorine.
Another voice spoke. “Amanda?” Miss Rebecca Reed’s hand touched me. “But where is her maid?”
Victorine whimpered. “I look and look all over this ship. I ask everyone. I look even under the blankets covering the dead. But there is no Miranda.” She swallowed a sob. “Perhaps there will be another lifeboat?”
I drifted into sleep. But before I was quite unconscious, I heard Victorine say, “Then Miranda is dead.” I seemed to hear it over and over until the voice became my own: “Miranda is dead.”
* * *
The ship that had saved us was the Carpathia. It had been making its unhurried way from New York to the Mediterranean along a southern route. When the Titanic had sent out its frantic messages on that fatal night, the Carpathia alone had answered the call.
At dawn when it reached this nameless stretch of sea, its passengers could hardly believe their eyes: women, dressed in the height of fashion, rising directly from the sea; infants, blue with cold, lying in the arms of dumbstruck nurses. Mrs. Brown appeared on the deck, her hands a mass of broken blisters, for she’d pulled on the oars through the night. Mrs. Astor in her smart dress and smarter hat stared back in disbelief at the sea that had taken her husband. Mrs. Ryerson reached out again and again to embrace her three children, to still their questions about their father.
Seven hundred such survivors stumbled or were lifted into the Carpathia. And those found dead in the open boats were laid out with as much dignity as could be summoned. But the Carpathia only paused where the unsinkable ship had vanished. It lingered in a wash of deck chairs and debris and empty life jackets. It crept across the grave of the fifteen hundred lost, and then it steamed away.
Messages fanned out across the unbelieving world, a world that held its breath until the Carpathia sailed into New York harbor three days later.
* * *
I lay in the stateroom through those days as one who has died and waits to learn of an afterlife. I lay in the twilight world of the concussion victim, unable to speak. And then unwilling. A doctor reset a shoulder I didn’t know was dislocated, and then my right arm lay useless in a sling across my breast. The doctor cleaned and bandaged my cheek and my forehead.
