The Captain's Daughter (12 page)

May kept to her cabin on the
Celtic
, out of sight from prying eyes. She knew the other passengers were dying to ask her questions about her experience and to pet the baby. There were toys for Ella; a First Class passenger sent a beautiful teddy bear for her to play with and a doll dressed in pink velvet with gold lace ribbons. People meant well but May was too exhausted to appreciate it. There were at least five other female survivors on board, some with children, and she’d seen they were fussed over and passed around as if they were famous. She avoided their company when she could. People wanted them to pose for photographs but she shied away from the fuss and attention from the start. Slowly people were starting to get the message.

She’d been upgraded to Second Class and was sure that Celeste had something to do with this. She didn’t deserve such a friend, one who’d saved her life. Their few days in New York she would never forget, riding in a carriage around Central Park, tasting ice-cream sodas, shopping in Macy’s, trying not to gawp at the luxuries on the counters and the elegant ladies in cartwheel hats who sipped tea in the restaurant and admired Ella. It wasn’t real. Nothing had been real since they’d set sail nearly two weeks ago. Could it really have been such a short time since she’d sailed into a new world, seen the bustle, noise and dust of the city? It wasn’t for the likes of her. She was pleased to be heading home. If not to her real home, then to her own country where all would be more familiar.

Not for the first time she wondered if she was in some strange dream waiting to wake up. In a matter of days, she’d travelled from Bolton to London, Southampton to New York, and now back again into the unknown; days and days of living in borrowed clothes, carrying a baby she hardly knew. Then in the small hours of darkness reality dawned, the pain hit and her mind felt like it would explode. It was as much as she could do to make up a bottle for the baby.

Ella suckled on it unheeding. As long as she was fed and changed, she was no bother.
I have taken someone else’s baby. God forgive me!
Willingly at first she’d clung to this child just for comfort but now there was no going back. She was her responsibility. For better or worse.

‘I don’t know you,’ she whispered in the baby’s ear. Ella grinned with such an appealing smile, and May shook her head. The innocence of the young. ‘But we’ve plenty of time to get to know each other, lass.’ There were days ahead to sit in peace, sing nursery rhymes and walk the decks before they must face the years to come.

Ella looked so different from Ellen, petite limbed, with long delicate fingers, and so dark skinned. She was foreign, no mistake about that. There’d been so many nations on board in steerage, families, women in headscarves jabbering away. Did this baby understand one word she was saying?

Everything they were wearing was new, from her black coat with the velvet trim, the smart hat and handbag, her calf-skin boots, her corset and shift. Only her careworn face was the same, but ravaged by sorrow, pale and drawn.

In her pocket was Celeste’s letter of introduction to one of the clergymen of Lichfield Cathedral, Celeste’s own father, Canon Forester. He would help her find a suitable position, her friend had insisted. What was a canon? The only cannon she knew was the gun that stood in the park. She’d no idea even where Lichfield was except it was somewhere close to Birmingham, and she’d never been inside a cathedral in her life.

Every time the ship’s engine shuddered or went silent, she felt the panic rise. What if it happened again? The icebergs were still out there. She could hardly bear to go on deck to look. It was hard to sleep shut up in a cabin, however comfortable it might be.

When Ella woke for her dawn milk, May dressed her warmly and forced herself to walk her up and down the deck, looking out to sea. There was no one around to stare at them but crew, who smiled and left her to her own thoughts. They sensed she wanted no fuss, no reminders of what had happened to them.

Celeste may want to publicize their experience, to tell the world what had happened, but she never would as long as she lived and she’d begged her friend not to tell the canon too much of their story; only that she had been widowed by the disaster.

‘Please,’ she’d insisted, ‘I don’t want us to be pitied and pointed out in the street.’ That was the only condition she’d asked in accepting this kind offer of help. Anonymity. The chance to start afresh. Celeste had had no option but to agree.

On 25 April, under a gull-grey sky, the ship slipped into the Western Approaches; that part of the Atlantic that heralded the coast of England was getting closer and soon they would be reaching Liverpool. There was one last task May decided she must do.

If this was to be a new start for both of them, then all reminders of this terrible experience must be destroyed: her salt-stiffened nightdress, the baby’s clothes, nothing that could identify them as passengers of the
Titanic.
She pulled out her own things and the baby’s clothes, stuffed them in the pocket of her new coat and took them on deck. When nobody was watching, she dropped her own clothes down into the water. They fluttered on the breeze at first, ballooned and then floated away like swollen bodies in the water. She turned away horrified at such a terrible reminder.

Then she fingered Ella’s gown with that beautiful lacy border, the bonnet, the one little shoe. The other had been lost somewhere that day they’d gone ashore in New York. She hadn’t noticed the lace’s intricate pattern before. It was a frieze of Noah’s Ark with animals two by two, dogs, horses, deer and a dove with outspread wings. Such fine work. As she touched the texture, she knew this lace had been made with love and pride.

The two of them had found an ark of safety in the lifeboat and then on the
Carpathia.
They were still at the mercy of the waves and water. Reaching over the side of the ship, May noticed how the swell of water frothed into hundreds of white holes with patterns like lace.

How could she watch these beautiful tiny clothes float away and sink like her own little girl must have done? She shoved them back into her pocket. These were not for the sea. They must be kept. They weren’t hers to destroy, but Ella must know nothing of the secrets they held. All May knew was that you don’t throw love away, however painful the memories.

The candelabras glittered, the diamonds shone on bracelets and ear drops. Dinner had gone well enough although Celeste hadn’t been able to eat a thing. How could she with her ribs so bruised, chafing against the tightness of her corset. It was agony to bend or twist but she must smile and be the perfect guest. Formally and precisely seated were the usual stuffy line-up of masters of industry that had sprung up in the past few years in the city, including partners from the Roetzel and Andress law firm. One of the B. F. Goodrich Company rubber magnates was sitting opposite her. Everyone wanted to hear her dramatic tale.

‘Isn’t it terrible about Walter Douglas?’ The Akron newspapers had been full of the loss on board of the founder of the Quaker Oats Company. ‘Poor Mahala was left with nothing but a fur coat on her back. And John Jacob Astor, Guggenheim, and that poor Strauss couple, all of whom died . . . You must have met some of them in First Class, Celestine?’

She paused before replying, seeing Grover giving her a pointed look. She smiled, nodding. ‘Those gentlemen were all so brave,’ she said. ‘They won’t be forgotten for their courage. I met some of their wives at the Relief Committee.’

‘I hear the steerage men behaved like brutes,’ said Grover’s mother, Harriet, as she stuffed another piece of cherry pie into her mouth.

‘That’s not what I saw,’ Celeste snapped back. ‘There were many gentlemen of all classes waving their children off and kissing their wives, knowing they’d never see them again. Most of the steerage passengers weren’t allowed on deck until near the end when there were no lifeboats left. Women and children too. The poor souls were left to die, abandoned. Fifty-three children died that night in steerage. Fifty-three. Only one in First Class and that was because she refused to leave her parents.’ She knew now that she had their full attention and could have turned their stomachs with even more harrowing details but this was neither the time nor the place. They wanted stories of heroism, nothing to disturb their night’s sleep. ‘But we raised ten thousand dollars on the ship alone for their immediate relief,’ she added proudly.

And besides, Grover had said earlier that she mustn’t go on about her experience at dinner. He’d not been impressed with her account.

‘Titanic!’
he’d said angrily. ‘I am sick of the damned ship, nothing but news of it on every page of the
Tribune.
Everyone knows the score now so don’t bang on about it on your high-and-mighty drum at the dinner tonight.’

‘But it was terrible, Grover,’ she’d protested. ‘I’ll never forget what I saw. I was so lucky to survive.’

‘What was all this business I heard from Bryden about sorting out that widow from steerage? There was an army of do-gooders to do that.’

‘May and I sat together in the lifeboat. She lost her husband and everything they possessed in the world. How could I not do my duty?’ Celeste said, trying not to raise her voice. She’d heard Susan bringing Roddy back a few minutes before. She longed to see him but knew she must wait for Grover to dismiss her. To rile him risked him keeping Roddy from her for even longer. ‘Besides, I wanted to help Mrs Brown with the survivors’ fund.’

‘Always the parson’s daughter,’ he sneered. ‘Thank God I had more sense than to let you take my son. If anything had happened to him . . .’ She could hear the threat in his voice.

The beating that followed was no surprise. She’d angered him and so she must be punished. He’d withheld Roddy until the last moment before they left for the dinner. She was too sore to pick him up and he had cried when he saw her, hiding behind Susan at first until she had produced a little package of toys. It broke her heart not to stay. It was all her fault for not returning when demanded.

Now she looked at the eager faces of Harriet’s guests and swiftly changed the subject.

‘Enough about me, what’s been happening while I was away?’ Celeste was soon subjected to all the local gossip, but when the women retired to the drawing room while the men took their port they took up the subject again. ‘Did you see Madeleine Astor? They say she is in a
delicate
condition . . .’

‘I saw her on the
Carpathia
, looking dreadful, and yes, she is pregnant.’

‘Only eighteen, not married five minutes to a man twice her age . . . and him a married man when they met . . . Still, what will be will be, and we mustn’t speak ill of the dead.’

‘Did you see many bodies? How terrible for you to be shoved onto a boat with all the Third Class riffraff! How relieved you must be to be home and dry and back amongst your own.’

Oh shut up, she wanted to say to these silly women, overstuffed into their evening gowns, their double chins wobbling, flesh bursting out of their low bodices. You have no idea how the world lives outside the few miles around here. Once your approval mattered to me, but not now. None of this mattered now, she sighed. I’ll never belong here. I’m too English, too different, too young to be sitting here gossiping with puffed-up women who care only for show and status and haven’t grasped anything of the horror I experienced. Why should they? It’s all like some cinematograph drama on the silver screen to them. I don’t want to be here, her heart cried out. I want to take Roddy and run.

She’d never felt so alone, so trapped, so frustrated. She’d watched Grover drinking steadily all night, his eyes flashing with fury as the attention kept being drawn back to his wife’s story.

The carriage would soon come and he’d paw her all the way home, expecting his reward in the bedroom. Not the gentle caresses of a lover but a rushed brutal entry, a grunt and then it would be over and she’d be left sore, feeling used and degraded once more.

How had it come to this? His tender caresses had quickly changed into attacks, even on their honeymoon in Paris. Once they were married, it was as if Grover had become a different person, criticizing her for the smallest thing: the way she dressed, her hairstyle, her accent, her background. He talked of moulding her into a suitable wife as if she was a piece of clay.

At first she had been too shocked, too frightened to resist or protest. But this terrible secret she must endure. His assault earlier was only a sample of what was to come if she disobeyed again.

In the early hours of the morning she’d lie awake listening to his snores, feeling desperate and helpless to move in case he woke and she’d have to be subjected to it all over again.

Now, sipping coffee, pretending she was enjoying herself and trying not to wince in pain, she realized she couldn’t live like this any more. Tonight a plan had formed in her mind. Listening to all that talk, to the spurious gossip, she knew there might be a way to take control. When they reached the house on Portage Hill, she’d offer Grover some of the fine whiskey she’d brought him back from New York and sit him down. She’d slip away, take her time undressing, knowing he was tired, drunk and ready to sleep. She would slip into Roddy’s nursery, careful not to disturb Susan next door. She would lock the door and find some blankets and a cushion for the daybed in there. Tonight she would be safe, and if Grover complained she’d explain that he was so tired she thought it better for him to sleep it off on the sofa.

Something that Harriet Parkes had said after dinner had made her think. ‘You ought to write it all down, my dear, before you forget the details.’ Why should she stay silent about what had happened on the
Titanic?
Why shouldn’t she tell her own story raise funds for the needy
Titanic
immigrants from Cornwall, arriving in Akron, by all accounts? The papers were full of the story of Margaret Brown, the socialite who had rowed one of the lifeboats herself. She was now a friend and Celeste was determined to attend every Titanic Survivors’ Committee, no matter what she had to do to get there.