Fateful (30 page)

As I reach the side, just at the bow of the lifeboat, I get a look over the edge and feel dizzy. The surface of the water is much closer than it used to be, but it’s still terrifyingly far. And the lifeboat is so small, packed with perhaps as many as fifty women and children.

The officer holds a hand out. “Come on, love, we’ll get you and the little girl aboard. More room in these things than it looks.” He might be offering me a sandwich at a picnic, save for the tension in his body.

“I can’t—I’ve got to find Alec.” And Irene. And Ned. And Myriam. And the old Norwegian ladies. I can’t leave not knowing how they are. Yet I’ve got to save Bea. I look at the woman in the lifeboat who is nearest me, a dowager who looks grander and snobbier than Lady Regina does in her fanciest dreams. Any port in a storm: I foist Beatrice on her. “Please, please, take the little girl? Keep her safe?”

The woman looks at me, and it’s as though the world goes silent. When her eyes meet mine, there’s no such thing as her being rich or me being poor. It couldn’t matter less that we’ve not even met. She knows I’m giving her a sacred responsibility, and she accepts it. I feel a shudder down in my soul as I realize that this woman would die before she’d let anything happen to Beatrice.

“I promise,” she says, in a cultured American accent. “I’ll look after her as though she were my own.”

I run a hand over Beatrice’s hair; the little girl’s eyes have begun to well with tears. She knows something’s wrong, just not what. “God bless you, ma’am.”

“And you,” the woman says, just as the officer gives the cry. The lifeboat begins to drop, and for a moment I feel like an idiot not being in it with them. But I know what I have to do.

I shove through the crowd back toward the doors. My balance shifts beneath me, and I stumble—or was that the ship? People cry out, and the mood around us grows yet more desperate. Woozily, I clutch a pole, feeling my exhaustion and my aching head anew. I wish I had more of my strength for this. I wish so many things were different. But I’ve got to keep going. If I stop now, it’s the death of me.

A voice calls above the din, “Tess!”

No matter how badly I’m hurting, no matter how great the clamor around us, there’s no way I could ever fail to recognize that voice.
“Alec!”

I peer through the crowd and see him—chestnut curls mussed, a gray overcoat beneath his life jacket, as he pushes his way toward me. Summoning what feels like the last of my strength, I run to him, knocking into people, stumbling over my own numb feet, until I fall into his arms.

Alec crushes me to his chest, and for one perfect second, I feel the comforting illusion of safety sweep over me.

But only for a second.

“There aren’t enough lifeboats,” I whisper into his ear.

“I know.” Alec just keeps holding me, pressing his lips to my forehead and my cheek. “I’ve been trying to find you. To save you.”

“I’ve been trying to save you.”

But as I look past him and realize there are no more lifeboats close by, I wonder if we’ve found each other too late.

Chapter 27

“WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?” I CLING TO ALEC, SO tightly it must hurt him. “That can’t be all the lifeboats. Surely.” The decks are packed with people now—hundreds of us. Layton said there weren’t enough boats for everyone, but they wouldn’t even let a ship go to sea if they couldn’t save more people than this. Would they?

“We won’t find them waiting here,” he says. Alec pulls me closer and kisses my forehead. As his fingers brush my bruised temple, I wince. “Tess, you’re bleeding. What happened?”

“Mikhail came after me. He abandoned me once the ship hit the iceberg.”

“To come after me,” Alec says darkly. I realize that the corner of his left eye is puffy and shadowed; he’ll have a shiner tomorrow. “Really, to come after the Initiation Blade. He came in—wild, worse than wild. I only got away from him because he was more interested in ransacking our cabin for the Blade.” He holds open the heavy gray coat he’s wearing over rumpled trousers and shirt to reveal the Blade’s hilt glinting within an inner pocket. Mikhail will be looking for quite a while.

I take some satisfaction from the fact that Mikhail’s cruelty and greed will doom him to death, but there’s not much time for anything but the one most important fact I know: “We have to get off this ship.”

“Let’s keep moving along. It can only help our chances.”

I know from the way Alec says it that he, too, knows not everyone on board will have a chance to live. Unless— “Is help coming? They would have called for help on the wireless.”

“I don’t know. We won’t know unless we see the other ship actually coming to rescue us.”

Both of us look toward the dark horizon, but there’s nothing out there. Only a gleaming field of stars overhead and spars of ice in the water below.

Despair wells up within me, as cold and merciless as the water rushing into the
Titanic
. The countless hours I worked so hard, went without good food or decent shoes so that I could save money for a new life in America—they all seem to taunt me now. Only Alec’s embrace is warm, real, here. I kept thinking he was a diversion from my goals, that what I’ve felt for him could stop me from getting what I wanted. That there was no way a man like him would ever belong to a servant girl like me. Too late I realize that he was the only thing I ever wanted that I could truly have.

I hug him even closer to me, as close as I can with the life jackets around our necks. It’s as though the terrible danger surrounding us goes black—it doesn’t go away, it’s all around us, but it’s hidden the same way nighttime hides the shapes that are so clear by day. Right now there’s nothing but Alec’s warmth and his love. I want to believe that nothing matters as long as we’re together.

But that’s not true. That’s shock talking—making me numb, dragging us down with the ship. Even now I can feel the tilt of the deck increasing; the
Titanic
dips even lower in the front than in the back. Is the prow below water now? I can’t see. Around us, people are beginning to shout and cry as they realize what I’ve known almost from the moment the cold water touched my hand. The ship is doomed.

Alec and I have only minutes to save our lives.

Alec begins pulling me toward the stern of the ship—slightly up the slope. “Not all the boats are gone yet,” he says. “We can get you in one if we hurry.”

“Not without you!”

“Tess—it’s women and children first.”

“But after—” My throat closes around the words. There will be no “after” the women and children are loaded aboard the lifeboats. Not enough room.

Alec’s going to die.

Then a familiar face appears amid the throng: George, harried but still kind as he moves through the crowds, urging them to stay calm. His expression changes as he sees me, somehow becoming yet more desperate. “Tess! Why on earth are you still aboard? They told me Myriam was aboard one of the first lifeboats off; why weren’t you with her?”

“I was trying to get the Lisles to the boat deck. Have you seen them?” George shakes his head. Please, please, let Irene have gotten out at least. At least Myriam is safe. “And Alec—here, Alec, this is Myriam’s George. George, this is Alec. Is there no lifeboat for him?”

Alec looks both exasperated and fond. “I told her what ‘women and children first’ means, but she won’t listen.”

George hesitates only for the space of a breath. “There are a few extra lifeboats.”

My heart leaps with unexpected hope. “You mean—”

Stepping closer to us both, George whispers, “They’re collapsibles—emergency use only, so they ought to be launching them any moment. Can’t announce it—we’d cause a stampede, and besides, who the hell can hear over this din any longer—forgive my language, Tess. Both of you, get over there.” He points the way we should go, toward the collapsible lifeboats.

I give Alec a look that means he had better not choose this moment to get noble and self-sacrificing. Although I can see that he’s reluctant to take this chance not everyone will have, he, too, wants to live. He turns to George. “Are you coming with us? To make a try for it?”

“No. It’s my duty to remain aboard until the last—and I shall.” George’s voice remains steady and sure, even as he faces his death.

Fighting back tears, I stand on tiptoe to kiss George on the cheek. His answering smile is uneven. “Won’t you tell Myriam—I’m sorry not to have had more time with her.”

“Of course I will.”

Alec and George shake hands, and though they only just met, I see in the glance that passes between them that they might have been friends given the chance. But George is all out of chances.

Then Alec pulls me away toward the other side of the ship and our best shot at survival. Within moments, George is lost in the thickening crowd.

I can still hear the band playing—it’s “The Blue Danube” now, I think—but the crowd has become larger and louder. Third-class passengers have finally found their way up en masse, but most of them don’t speak English or still don’t understand what to do. Most everyone has their life jackets on now. Although some people are still laughing, the sound of it has become shrill, and there’s crying mixed in too. The chill of the night grows harsher with every minute; the brilliant, cloudless field of stars overhead almost seems to be mocking us in its perfection and serenity. As the slope of the deck deepens, people are increasingly likely to grab onto a railing or another person for support.

It haunts me, the people I see. The Strauses, sitting side by side in deck chairs and holding hands, apparently willing to die as long as they’re together. A frightened little girl, sobbing for her mommy—in the moment before I can stop to help her, a kindly red-haired woman does so, promising to help the child find her mother, though by now she must realize how difficult this will be, if it is even possible. Boys no more than twelve or thirteen, trying to look brave as they stand by their fathers’ sides, apparently already judged too much “men” to be boarded onto lifeboats as children.

Worse are the people I don’t see: the elderly Norwegian ladies from my room. Ned. Irene.

We pass through the ship—running into the first-class lounge, where men in tuxedos continue playing cards, mostly out of bravado. The group in there has become a more motley crew: Women are now smoking cigars, and at least one uniformed waiter for the first-class dining room has donned a top hat he found from somewhere. People are behaving strangely—laughing in the face of death.

The sight of it shakes Alec too, but he doesn’t slow down. “We have to get you to a lifeboat.”

“We both have to get to the lifeboats,” I correct him.

“I can’t do it,” Alec says, though he keeps leading me. “I can’t get on a lifeboat when children are still here dying.”

“Your life isn’t worth less than anyone else’s!” When Alec glances over his shoulder at me, his mournful eyes tell me he doesn’t believe that’s true. Will his guilt for the steward’s death keep him from attempting to survive now? So I try again: “Alec, I need you with me. We’re going to be in a tiny boat on the ocean in the cold, in the dead of night—God only knows when or if help is coming. Don’t make me do it alone!”

Alec doesn’t reply, but he grips my hand more tightly and pulls me in another direction. I hope it’s a good sign.

We make our way past the magnificent grand staircase; one of the cast-iron cupids at the bottom is so tilted now that he seems to have taken flight. The angle of the ship makes running treacherous, but we keep going. As I glance back I see the first rivulets of water begin to trickle over the tile floor below.

Then I remember someone else I haven’t seen. “Your father! We have to go after him.”

“No. Dad’s already chosen to go down with the ship. He said he’d be ashamed to take a seat that could go to a lady.” He hesitates, and I know he’s fighting back a sob, though I can’t think it unmanly to cry when facing the death of a beloved father. “Dad said I should go after you. We—we said our good-byes.”

“Oh, Alec—we can’t leave him—”

“Don’t, Tess. I can’t go through it again. He won’t change his mind. You’re the only one left for me to save.”

My head whirls so that I nearly go into a faint, and I feel as though I might be sick. Is it just fear? Or is it Mikhail’s attack? That seems as though it happened in another lifetime, not mere hours ago.

I simply tighten my fingers around Alec’s. He’s with me. We’ll get aboard a lifeboat. Nothing after that will matter, because we’ll be together.

We burst through the doors farther down the deck. It’s far less crowded here, hardly anybody around but the crew. An officer stands near one of the lifeboat davits, and Alec calls to him, breath gray as fog in the cold air, “We need to get this girl into a lifeboat!”

“Both of us!” I shout, correcting him again.

It doesn’t matter, because the officer shakes his head, and my heart plummets. “The last boat just launched! Hardly seconds ago!”

Oh, God. We run to the side of the ship, as if the man might have lied to us, but of course he told the truth: The last lifeboat within sight is being lowered down and is already a couple of dozen feet below us. The water is closer to the deck—too close now. We’re trapped.

We’re going to die.

Alec and I look at each other, stricken. Then I fling my arms around his neck. As he holds me close, I choke out the words, “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“And I’m proud to stand by your side—no matter what comes.” Tears blurring my vision, I look up at Alec’s face. The tenderness of his expression melts my heart.

He frames my face with his hands as he says, “Tess. Only you could be brave enough to die with me. But I want you to live for me.”

We kiss, as desperate as though we were drowning.

When our lips part, Alec says, “Forgive me.”

Then he picks me up—inhuman strength lifting me from the deck as if I were half flying—and flings me over the railing of the ship, toward water, toward darkness, away from him forever.

Chapter 28

IT FEELS LIKE I FALL FOREVER.