The Midnight Watch (23 page)

I beckoned Frank to come out into the alleyway. As he walked towards me I could see he was drunker than usual; he steadied himself by holding my arm. I drew him away from the door a little and asked him whether the captain was going to jail.

‘Jail? Oh no. Worse. Washington!’ Frank giggled. ‘The marshal’s got a warrant. He says the captain and the wireless man have got to go to Washington tonight and if they don’t go the marshal will put the handcuffs on. But the captain says it’ll delay the ship, and it’s a British ship, and he won’t go unless the company says so. So your fat girlfriend’s gone ashore to try to sort it out on the telephone.’

‘My girlfriend?’

‘Fat Jack. The captain’s in a sulk. Won’t say a word till Fat Jack gets back.’

We didn’t have to wait long. I heard heavy breathing and felt a movement of air. Thomas appeared at the top of the stairs, swaying and sweating.

‘I thought you’d turn up,’ he said when he saw me. He squeezed past into the chartroom and Frank and I followed. ‘You’ve got to go,’ he said to Lord, trying to get his breath. ‘Tonight. Franklin says so. There’s nothing I can do about it.’

Lord stood up. ‘Very well,’ he said, turning his back to the marshal, ‘if the company wishes it, then I am perfectly willing to go. Perfectly willing.’ Franklin’s permission seemed to empower him. ‘I will go to Washington and tell the good senators how I had stopped my ship while the
Titanic
was rushing along under full speed.
That
is what I will tell them.’ He emphasised key words with a dramatic point of his finger, but he seemed to be addressing an audience in his own mind, for he made no eye contact with anyone. ‘And Mr Evans will say how we warned the
Titanic
of the ice with the wireless equipment, how we told her, “There is ice all around!” – and how she ignored us.’ Lord stopped for a moment, then gazed at me, Frank, and the two other reporters who were there. ‘That,’ he said, softening his voice in conclusion, ‘is why we have been subpoenaed, and that’s what we will say. I expect it will take us about ten minutes.’

No one in the room moved. I looked at Frank, he looked at me, and the two pressmen at the chart table looked at each other. Thomas’s breathing remained loud and gaspy. Lord had, I think, surprised us all.

Thomas spoke first. ‘Right then, gentlemen,’ he said, trying to usher us towards the door with a sweep of his hand. Still no one moved.

‘But what about the rockets?’ It was old Frank who spoke now, with sudden clarity. ‘Do you deny what this engineman says?’ It was only then that I noticed he was holding a folded page from the
Boston American
– my story setting out Gill’s affidavit – which he now held up for the captain.

‘I have absolutely nothing more to say about that,’ Lord said. There was the hard edge of anger in his voice. ‘I told you fellows my story the other day – here, in this very room – but now you are all putting stock in what that fellow says.’ He gestured dismissively towards the newspaper page. ‘It is all lies and I will not say one more word about it.’

‘But do you
deny
it, Captain?’ asked Frank, shaking the page. Liquor was giving some heat to his frustration.

‘It denies itself! I don’t know why this fellow would tell such a story – I don’t know why he would admit such unsailorlike deeds. He says he saw the rockets but didn’t tell anyone. Do you suppose that any man – of any race whatsoever – would see signals of distress and not report them to the bridge? Every officer and every man of my crew is an Englishman and a white man, and I tell you, none of them would stand by and see anybody in distress without trying to help. I have heard he received five hundred dollars for his story. Five hundred dollars! There is your answer. That is the reason he is talking such poppycock.’

Once again I had a sense of the irresistible will of the man and of his unassailable belief in the force of his own words. For him, to say something was enough to make it so.

‘Captain Lord,’ I asked, ‘may we put some questions to your second officer?’

Lord turned to me. ‘You may not,’ he said. ‘I have said all that needs to be said.’

‘But,’ I persisted, glancing at Thomas to try to enlist his aid, ‘wasn’t it your second officer who was on watch at the time? Can’t we ask him what he saw?’

‘You may ask
me
what we saw, and
I
will tell you.’

‘But the second officer was on the bridge. Did he report rockets to you, Captain?’

‘I have told you —’

He stopped suddenly. He was no longer looking at me, but beyond me. I saw him give a slight shake of his head. I turned and saw, framed in the open door of the chartroom, the second officer. The alleyway behind him was dark, and he must have been standing there listening. But now, as he stepped forward, the light from the chartroom fell full on him so that he had a strange luminescence. He seemed almost angelic. I was struck again by his prettiness; he had such high cheekbones and such dark, knowing eyes. He looked at us calmly; he was not the darting, nervous man I’d seen days earlier eavesdropping in the alleyway. I thought, He has resolved to do something noble.

We fell silent and waited.

‘I will answer, if you like, Captain,’ Stone said, in a voice soft but sure.

Lord stared straight ahead – a hard, crystalline stare. One hand, held palm outwards, pushed slowly at the air. ‘There is no need, Mr Stone,’ he said.

But Stone did not retreat. ‘Truly, Captain. I will answer their questions.’

The other reporters held their pencils still. They were looking to me and waiting, as if they understood: this was my story, this man was my discovery, and it was only right that I should ask the question.

So I asked it. ‘Mr Stone, did you see any rockets during your watch and report them to your captain?’

The question was simply put and simply answered.

‘I did not.’

I gaped at him. I had not thought he had the courage for such a lie. Indeed, so innocently and convincingly did he speak that I thought I might, after all, have been mistaken. Perhaps he hadn’t seen any rockets. The rumours from the carpenter might be false. Gill might be lying. Perhaps the pilot was right. I tried to read Stone’s face. He appeared serene. Years at sea had not roughened his skin; it was as white and smooth as a woman’s. His eyes were steady. He seemed to radiate the truth.

‘Are you quite certain?’ I asked.

‘I am,’ he said. ‘I did not notify the captain of any rockets, because I did not see any. Nobody on our ship saw any.’

My next question was impertinent, but I felt honour-bound to put it. ‘Mr Stone, has the captain made you say these things?’

Stone did not hesitate. ‘No,’ he said, ‘he has not made me say them. He hasn’t made me do anything. He is a good captain.’

Such loyalty! I paused. I could not think what else to ask him. Thomas moved quickly to the centre of the room, clapped his hands and said, ‘That’s that, then. Everything’s resolved. Thank you, gentlemen.’

Herbert Stone disappeared down the alleyway, and Lord walked into his cabin and closed the door behind him. The marshal said he would wait where he was and the two other reporters rushed off to file their stories. Old Frank ambled along after them down the alleyway, muttering to himself.

Jack Thomas surprised me by inviting me for a drink in the ship’s dining saloon while he waited for Lord. ‘You see, old boy?’ he said, generously pouring bourbon into my glass. ‘The captain is telling the truth after all. His second officer says so. You’ve been misled by that grubby boy from the engine room.’

‘That grubby boy,’ I said, ‘is on his way to Washington as we speak, and tomorrow he will tell Senator Smith all he knows. Under oath.’

‘He knows nothing.’

‘He knows enough. And I wonder what the captain will say about the rockets when
he
is under oath.’

‘John, old boy, Smith doesn’t care about the rockets! He cares only that brave Captain Lord and his wireless man tried to warn the
Titanic
and the
Titanic
ignored them. Franklin tells me Smith was in a rage about it. Furious! That’s why subpoenas were issued, and that, old boy, is what our captain will tell the world. Under oath.’

Perhaps Thomas was right. After all, Stone, the watcher of the rockets, hadn’t been called to Washington. ‘We shall see,’ I said.

Thomas looked at me across the table and finished his drink in one long, aerated slurp. ‘You know, John,’ he said, ‘I am trying my very best to forgive you. But you do make it difficult.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, likewise draining my bourbon in a single gulp, and holding it out for a refill. ‘Now, tell me. What train did you say the captain was catching?’

‘The midnight special.’ Thomas eyed me closely. ‘The marshal will take him along to the station. Why do you ask?’

‘No reason,’ I said, slowly stirring my bourbon with a pencil.

Part Two

CHAPTER 14

I had not forgotten Krupp’s demand that I file a story that night, but he’d been expecting Lord to be carted off to jail, not sent triumphant to the nation’s capital by luxury train. So I didn’t file, but instead made my way to South Station and followed the captain onto the midnight train to Washington. That, surely, was what Krupp would have wanted.

I have always known just how easy it is to fool people with a simple disguise. Wear a starched blue shirt and pin a polished silver star to your chest and you can direct traffic at the busiest intersection in Boston. Hobble on a walking stick and courteous folk will open doors for you. So I always kept in my satchel a pair of plain-glass spectacles, a woollen cap, and a false moustache and beard, and once I was aboard the train I put them on. Bourbon had made me brave. I felt like getting into the cage with the lion.

Jack Thomas had booked Lord a sleeper berth, but the midnight service offered a late supper and I found him sitting alone in the dining car. Cyril Evans was nowhere to be seen. When I took the seat opposite the captain, he showed no sign of recognising me so I stroked my beard, ordered a drink and offered to buy him one too. He refused. ‘I never drink,’ he said, ‘except for a port wine at Christmas. One glass.’

‘If you spent Christmas with my wife’s family,’ I said in my best Texan accent, ‘as I am compelled to do, you’d need more than one glass to get through, yes sir!’

Lord gave a polite smile but then begged my pardon and turned to the window. He was tired, he said, so must be excused from conversation. I apologised profusely.

‘My wife,’ I added, ‘says it is my very worst sin, the way I just prattle on and on, with no one wantin’ to listen!’ I said that of course he must be silent and restful and ignore me altogether.

Some time passed.

‘Although,’ I said, ‘I can hear an accent, and am mighty curious about what might have brought a man such as y’self to this part of the world at this hour.’

‘I am a sea captain,’ Lord said. ‘From England.’

‘What a grand thing!’ I said. ‘A very grand thing.’

Lord turned towards me a little. I thought he might ask me again to be quiet, but my jovial talk and the gentle swaying of the train seemed to open him up a little. He listened and nodded when I said that my father was a yachtsman, that I was heading south to spend some days with him on the Chesapeake. ‘But I know nothing of the water, no sir,’ I said. ‘Not like you, sir.’

‘I do know something of it,’ Lord said.

I bubbled and frothed as a woman might, asking him what it was like to be in a storm, what exotic places he had visited, and by slow gradations this reserved British captain began to talk to me. He was, as he claimed, tired, and there were periods of long silence, but on his topics of interest he became voluble, even warm. His supper arrived, and as he ate he told me something of growing up amid the vast cotton mills of Lancashire, of proving to his father that he could be as brave as his four older brothers, of his mother’s cold and bony hands gripping his own every morning to give strength to his prayers. His brothers went into textiles, but at thirteen he went to sea as a midshipman on sailing ships. He told me about Cape Horn storms and how, in calmer weather, he would lie flat on the yards and listen to the sails snap and crack beneath him. It was God’s workplace, he said. He was sitting upright in his seat, his starched collar buttoned stiffly and his hat in his lap. From this close distance I saw just how noble was his face, with its angular structure, piercing eyes and large forehead rising to a bald crown.

For a while, he seemed to forget I was there. He spoke as if addressing a far-off audience – his mother and father, perhaps, or their sacred memory. He spoke of his mother’s bible, and told me how, when the other midshipmen went ashore in Chile’s Talcahuano Bay to visit honey-skinned women, he would use it to keep himself strong. When the boys came back to the ship drunk and boasting of sinful things he would take it with him to the open deck above, look up at the masts and yards, and think about the majesty of the wind and sea.

‘But things are not now as they were under sail,’ he said, his face lit by the electric flashes of passing signals. ‘Sail bred
discipline
. One wrong move on a yard and things were over for you. Steam has brought with it a certain … laxity. It’s hard these days to get good officers.’ He spoke softly, as if voicing a profound inner knowledge. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘steam makes men soft.’

He told me that he sailed as second officer when he was only nineteen, that he obtained his First Mate’s Certificate when he was twenty. He was appointed to his first command when he was only twenty-eight years old. ‘Most uncommon, you know,’ he said, ‘to get command so young.’

Lord asked me no questions about my own life. I was glad. I was too tired myself to invent tales of sailing on the Chesapeake. Moreover our train was hurtling onwards and Lord must soon retire for the night, so I tried to guide him to more revealing topics.

I asked about his family. His wife was wonderful and grand, he said, but – and here his face gave a little grimace – his young son was sickly. He turned the subject to golf. When home, he played every Thursday afternoon at the Wallasey golf course. ‘For the game, you understand, not for the social side.’ Wallasey, he explained, was across the river from Liverpool.