The Midnight Watch (7 page)

‘Yes.’

‘You were here for the
Cedric
?’

‘Yes. And the
Republic
.’

‘And the Triangle fire, too?’

‘Yes.’

‘It affected us all, you know. The fire. All those girls. What you wrote.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘What you found out, I mean.’ Franklin looked away, as if troubled by his memories. ‘It affected us – here. We take great care…’ He gave a gentle nod of his head towards the office outside, to the office girls, the clerks. But I knew he meant more than that: he meant his ships. He took great care with his ships. He was telling me he was no Max Blanck.

There was noise and bustle. Toppin reappeared and ushered in the reporters, yelling orders, trying to control them. There were men from Associated Press, Reuters,
The
New York Times
, the
New York Tribune
,
The
Evening Sun
, and others. There must have been at least twenty men in the room. One knocked over an Egyptian statuette that cluttered to the floor and broke into two pieces, and another slipped on a pile of papers. Many tapped the ash from their cigarettes directly onto the carpet. The reporters were excited; they smelled of body odour and damp wool.

‘Gentlemen,’ Franklin said in a low voice without getting up. ‘With the greatest sadness, I am going to read to you a message I have from Captain Haddock of the
Olympic
, the
Titanic
’s sister ship. It is, you understand, a confirmed message.’ There was instant silence. The reporters in the room lifted their pencils to their notebooks.

Franklin began to read in a flat, clear voice. ‘“Six-thirty a.m.
Carpathia
reached
Titanic
’s position at daybreak. Found boats and wreckage only.
Titanic
had foundered about 2.20 a.m. —’ He did not have a chance to finish. Five or six men rushed from the room. That the
Titanic
had sunk was enough for them. Franklin waited, and then began again. ‘“The
Titanic
had foundered about 2.20 a.m. in 41 degrees 46 minutes north, 50 degrees 14 minutes west. All her boats accounted for. About 675 souls saved, crew and passengers, latter nearly all women and children. Leyland Line SS
Californian
remaining and searching position of disaster.
Carpathia
returning to New York with survivors. Please inform Cunard. Signed, Captain Haddock,
Olympic
.”’

Franklin looked up. ‘That is the message. I do not have a list of those who have been saved. I am trying to get that just as soon as possible.’ He gave a quick nod to invite questions.

‘Has Mr Astor been saved?’

‘I do not have a list of those who have been saved,’ repeated Franklin.

‘Mr Guggenheim?’

‘I do not have a list —’

‘What of Major Butt? Have you spoken to the President?’

‘I have not spoken to the President.’

‘But what about Mr Ismay?’

‘I have not heard from Mr Ismay.’

The questioning continued. Franklin seemed distant and disconnected. One reporter asked whether he might see the
Olympic
Marconigram for himself. It was then I noticed that Franklin had not let it go. It was still taut between his hands, perfectly steady.

Franklin refused. It was the only copy he had; he would keep it, but he would read it again if the reporter liked. The reporter, with his pencil poised, said that he would be grateful.

Franklin began to read again but as he did so his voice cracked, then broke. His eyes watered, so that drops fell onto the yellow paper of the Marconigram and spread in little lily pads of blue ink. When he reached the words ‘latter nearly all women and children’, he could not go on. He wept freely and openly, as if some force, suppressed for too long, had finally broken free. Great heaving sobs shook his frame and there was an immensity about him, as if he were crying not just for the many hundreds of people who had died on his ship, but for all America, and all Great Britain.

No one in the room spoke. I watched Franklin’s face, transfixed. I saw something reborn, something washed clean, something breathtakingly honest. In one word, I saw courage: the courage to face the world anew, courage to stare down the truth. ‘The
Titanic
,’ he said at last, his sobs subsiding, ‘has gone.’

The remaining reporters, their own eyes wet, straggled away. Byrne whispered to me that it was time for us to leave, too. But before we did I had a question.

‘Mr Franklin,’ I asked, ‘the cablegram you read says the Leyland ship
Californian
is searching the position of the disaster. Does that mean that there might yet be other survivors?’

Franklin stared at me: such deep blue eyes. ‘No,’ he said. ‘The only survivors are on the
Carpathia
. This we know.’

‘So the
Californian
is searching for the dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where is she bound?’

Franklin looked to Ridgeway, Head of Steamships, standing to his right.

‘Boston,’ said Ridgeway.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

Byrne and I left the room, and the IMM offices, and walked out once more into the cold Manhattan evening. I held Byrne by the shoulders and thanked him. When I told him I was going to the train station he was puzzled: why not stay in Manhattan to get the survivors’ stories when they arrived?

‘I will leave the survivors to you,’ I said. ‘I’m going home to the bodies.’ I turned and began my slow walk north along Broadway.

CHAPTER 6

‘To Lord: I am taking the survivors to New York. Please stay in the vicinity and pick up any bodies. Rostron.’

Cyril Evans held the message tight in his small, dirty hands. Pick up
bodies
? This was an important message – direct from the captain of the
Carpathia
to the captain of his own ship – but he did not rush it to the bridge. It was not what he had expected. For a moment he sat at his desk and thought.

It had been the morning of his life. These hours and minutes had been the reason he’d studied so hard at the Marconi school. The
Californian
had been closest to the scene of the rescue, and in the cacophony of crisscrossing signals, all on the same frequency, operators were obliged to listen to him first. ‘We are at the
Carpathia
now,’ he tapped out to the world the moment his ship arrived at the scene. ‘I can see her taking up the boats. She is only a mile away.
Titanic
foundered about two a.m.’ Evans had wound the magnetic detector as tight as it would go; he had tapped at his Morse key with frantic energy. Inspector Balfour on the nearby
Baltic
asked him again to keep quiet and keep out, but this time Evans kept going. He had precedence. He took scribbled notes of what has happening, hoping that when the
Californian
arrived in Boston the newspapers would ask him all about it. This was his chance to become a hero, just like Jack Binns.

But then this message about picking up bodies. It gave him pause. He did not know what notes to make. No one would want to hear about bodies. As he smoothed the yellow Marconi paper, smudging its pencilled letters, he began to imagine them coming aboard, hauled up at the end of a hook by the ship’s derricks, wet and bloated, to be laid out on the foredeck hatches. Would the captain then bury them at sea? No, he thought, it would be pointless to pull them up only to send them back again. But how would they be stored? Would the rich, perhaps, be laid out in the empty passenger cabins, amid the satinwood and teak and woollen quilts? And the poor lie on ice on the rough wooden pallets of the ’tween decks? Jack Binns had never spoken of cargo hooks or refrigeration, or faces twisted in death.

Evans wanted to screw up the Marconigram and throw it into the sea. But he knew he must not. He put on his coat and took it up to the bridge.

*   *   *

Herbert Stone knew something of what it was like to drown – or at least to gasp for air and to suffocate. Once, as a young boy, he had tried to please his father by taking hay to their cattle. But he was forgetful and left a gate open, so that a calf escaped and drowned in a bog. As punishment, his father took him into his workroom, a small space cluttered with splintered wood and tools and animal skins, and struck him hard across the face. Blood rose hot in Herbert’s cheeks and tears burned his eyes. When he could not stop his sobs, his father stuffed his mouth with a turpentine-soaked rag, whispering in his ear as he did so, ‘What are you? A
girl?
’ Mucus bubbled and blocked his nose; he was not able to breathe. He struggled and tried to cry out, but his father held the rag even tighter in his mouth so that he ‘would know how the drowned calf felt’. Herbert punched and struck with his arms but he could not break free and he thought he must die. But at last he made himself still and quiet, and, desperate for air, locked his wide unblinking eyes onto his father’s. In his mind he begged his father to stop. He imagined the word ‘sorry’ passing from him to his father. He concentrated; he willed the word through. And at last the rag was removed. As he gulped in air – cool, soothing, wonderful air – his father enfolded him in his arms and rocked him gently. ‘My dear, dear son,’ his father said. ‘See? You’re a good boy, really.’

Years later, as a junior apprentice, he had been forced to share a cabin with a senior boy who was fierce and cruel. Between them they were assigned only one bucket of wash water per day. The senior boy would use it first then pass it on to Herbert. One day, before passing on the bucket, the older boy urinated in it. Herbert refused to take it. In an instant his arms were pinned behind his back and his head forced deep into the filthy water. He writhed and panicked, but the more he struggled, the more tightly his head was held down. His chest tried to draw in air, but he fought it, keeping his mouth firmly shut. And then, just as he had in his father’s workroom, he willed himself to be still. He waited, with his head in the bucket, perfectly still, until at last he was pulled free.

When Stone told these things to the third officer, standing with him at the rail as their ship searched for the dead, Groves said, ‘But you know, none of the people from the
Titanic
will have drowned.’

Stone turned to him. ‘What do you mean?’

‘On P&O ships there were always enough lifejackets for everyone, and if there was any sort of emergency, the first thing they said was “Put on your lifejackets!” And you can’t drown with a lifejacket on so they will have died of the cold.’ Stone wished Groves would stop talking, but the young man went on. ‘Hypothermia,’ he said, ‘is what they call it. I learned all about it. Did you know, water sucks heat from your body thirty times faster than air? But they say it’s not such a bad way to die. After a while you just feel a bit tired, then you stop shivering, and by the end you feel quite warm. Then you fall asleep.’

Stone stared at him. The third officer, he realised, was trying to comfort him, to offer some small twig of consolation. Don’t worry about the fifteen hundred who died, he was saying, because they did not gasp desperately for air, but quietly fell asleep. Stone wondered whether the third officer knew just how tiny and withered that twig was.

But either way, frozen or drowned, where were the bodies?

In the water around him, Stone could see none. He could see the pretty
Carpathia
, less than a mile away, her white accommodation glittering and flashing in the sun, and her passengers lining the rails and waving at him as if they were daytrippers on a picnic steamer. He could see, in the vibrantly blue water between the rescue ship and his own, some debris: a piece of rope, an oar, a lifejacket, a woman’s shawl spreading silently on the water. Closer inboard was a small lifeboat whose canvas sides had collapsed so that the frigid water lapped freely over a sodden suitcase jammed between the thwarts. So little wreckage, he thought, for such a large ship.

‘Probably,’ said Cyril Evans, who had appeared briefly by his side and seemed to be reading his thoughts, ‘everything was taken down by the suction.’

When the
Carpathia
steamed off to the west and the semaphore flags had been put away, Captain Lord ordered full ahead on the engine. Stone heard the chief officer talking to the bosun about grappling hooks and derrick booms. The second officer was not asked to do anything. Nobody came near him; he stood alone at the aft end of the bridge, out of the way, while the captain stood on the starboard bridge wing and stared straight ahead into the hardening morning light. Captain Lord’s bridge coat looked oddly square and stiff. He seemed almost to be part of the ship’s structure. Stone wanted to speak to him – about the rockets, about what to say and do about them – but now was not the time.

He held tight to the rail and observed the water below, which had begun to hiss and spit as the ship picked up speed. The wind rose, rattling the bridge awnings, and the sea became choppy, with streaks of white froth scudding along low-lying crests. When the captain stepped inboard to speak to the chief officer, Stone heard only scraps of what was said – that the bodies might have been carried south by the Labrador Current, or west by the wind, that it was impossible to know where they were.

There was a cry from the third officer, who stood on the port bridge wing looking through binoculars to the south. He was gesturing to an iceberg in the middle distance, perhaps three or four miles away. It glowed white and rose to grand and sparkling pinnacles, but Groves was pointing downwards, towards dark shapes on a lower shelf of the berg, close to the sea. The shapes could not be clearly made out; they were indistinct dark patches. They might be dirt, Stone thought, or rock. But then, as he watched, the shapes moved.

‘Hard a-starboard!’ the captain called to the quartermaster. The ship’s bow swung round to the south. The captain rang the telegraph twice forward to its stops, and the smoke at the funnel thickened and billowed as the
Californian
thrashed through the water. But as three miles became two, and then one, and the ship came to a stop near the iceberg, her bow drifting gently around to lie broadside to it, the chief officer said aloud what Stone could plainly see.