The Lifeboat: A Novel (18 page)

Now and then I like to take the article out from where it is hidden and try to decipher it the way one would try to solve a riddle. It does serve to pass the time, but I haven’t come to any firm conclusion about whether Hardie and Blake were coconspirators or enemies. I think they were probably a little of both.

WEEKS PASSED WHILE
our lawyers collected evidence and prepared our case. During that time, I only saw Hannah and Mrs. Grant when we were called in for a hearing, for they were confined in some other part of the prison; but now that the trial has started, I see them on the daily ride to and from the courthouse in the prison van. We say very little to one another, but several times during the ride and later in court, I have caught Mrs. Grant eyeing me. At other times she seems to be whispering about me to Hannah, but there are long periods when her eyes are downcast or she stares off at nothing, and I wonder if she is still thinking the grand and powerful thoughts I imputed to her on the boat.

Every morning the route is the same: across a cobbled bridge, past a church with a tall steeple, then along a narrow street of brick buildings that glow blood-red when bathed in light from the rising sun. In the afternoon we travel the same route in reverse, but by then the houses have been drained of color and seem to be falling against their foundations more than their foundations seem to be holding them up. People hang listlessly about in doorways, waiting for fate. What are they thinking? Was it love or something else that made one brash young man pull the girl he was walking with into a doorway and kiss her on the lips?

Except for rare occasions, I do not talk to Hannah and Mrs. Grant. My attorneys have instructed me to keep my own counsel, and for the most part I do. One exception to this was when we were being driven back to the jail after the first day of the trial. The two matrons who accompanied us were conversing with each other, and Hannah took the opportunity to say in what might have been a sarcastic tone, “What do you think of the jury, Grace? Do you find them to your liking?”

Of course I had been curious to see the faces of the people who would be judging us, but apart from thinking that they looked a very usual lot, I had noticed nothing special about them. I replied that they seemed very fine and that I hoped they would listen to the facts with open minds and compassionate hearts.

“And how do they look so fine to you? Do you find them particularly handsome? Is that it?”

“By ‘fine,’ I meant alert and intelligent, I suppose. Just the sort of people one might expect.” Then I passed on to Hannah what Mr. Reichmann had said to me about having been lucky that two of the jurors had relatives who had perished on the
Titanic.

“Ah, yes! That is exceedingly lucky!” said Hannah. I was not at all sure what she meant, but I knew now that I was not the source of her anger; I only made a convenient target. Whenever I looked at Hannah I had trouble recognizing the woman from the lifeboat: what had seemed an independent and fierce spirit now seemed sullen and argumentative. Perhaps what I had admired had been suppressed by circumstance, or perhaps it had never existed except in my imagination. My thoughts on the matter changed from day to day, but I was concerned with much more pressing issues, and Hannah no longer seemed as important as she once had.

“Don’t pay any attention to Hannah,” Mrs. Grant said. “She is merely upset that there are no female jurors.”

Foolishly, I exclaimed, “But how could there be! Only voters are allowed to sit on juries, and women cannot vote!” It took me a moment to realize that I had made Hannah’s point for her. I startled myself into silence, and for a while we trundled along without speaking. We were nearly at the place where I had seen the couple kissing when Hannah whispered, “I am sure a jury of men suits you just fine, doesn’t it?” But I only stared out the window and let her have the last word. It wasn’t me she was angry at, and if the world needed changing before it would suit her, I could only wish her luck.

It was during another of these return trips that Hannah leaned toward me in order to be heard over the rattle of the van and whispered into my ear: “You’re not as weak as you pretend to be.”

Before the lifeboat, I had never had to consider the notion of physical strength, at least in relation to myself; nevertheless, my stamina surprised me and was a great blessing. Of course, those who fell apart, either mentally or physically, were not prosecuted. Hannah and Mrs. Grant pointed out that we were, if you looked at it a certain way, being punished for being strong, but I did not see it like that. When I had a chance to address the court at one of our hearings, I thanked the Lord for preserving me thus far and said I put my trust in him and the jury to weigh the evidence and do what was right. The lawyers made the point that the three of us were hardly a threat to society—we had to be neither rehabilitated nor feared, for what was the likelihood that we would find ourselves in such a position again?

For those twenty-one days, I was surrounded by people losing their minds and expiring in the night, but this did not happen to me. I don’t know why not. In his opening statement the prosecuting attorney asked, “And why did you survive? Why did not the three of you succumb to the elements? Why didn’t you become weak and sick like so many of the others? And wouldn’t someone who was truly strong choose the nobler part and jump overboard in order to save others?”

“And who’s truly noble?” asked Mrs. Grant by way of reply. “Are you?” Apparently she was not supposed to answer, and the judge tapped his gavel and told the jury her answer must be disregarded. When we exited the courthouse at the end of the day, a knot of reporters was waiting for us. “Why did you survive?” they called out. “Can you tell us the source of your strength?”

Later, Hannah stamped her foot against the floor of the prison van and cried, “What is this, a witch trial? Is the only way we can prove our innocence by drowning?” I replied that perhaps there was a more profound point to be made about innocence, that perhaps a person could not be both alive and innocent, but Hannah gave me a cold look and went back to addressing Mrs. Grant. Perhaps she was angry that I was the one who had answered the reporters’ questions about why we had survived rather than perished. I could only reply—even though I had long since given up any semblance of traditional belief—“The grace of God.” The next day the newspapers ran a headline in bold type:
SAVING GRACE
, it said, and underneath the headline was a short piece that conferred a sort of mystical meaning on my name.

From the beginning, the press and others were more sympathetic to me than they were to Mrs. Grant and Hannah, who early on pointed this out, saying, “Let’s be honest, Grace. You’re just innocent enough to get away with it.” Whenever anyone tells you a thing like that, you’re bound to try to defend yourself, and I responded that she and Mrs. Grant were the ones who were playing to an audience by insisting on going so far against the grain of the public’s expectations. But eventually I had the realization that we all had to decide when to fight convention and when to accede to it, and in that, the three of us were not so different after all.

The chief witnesses against us were Mr. Preston and Colonel Marsh. The Colonel’s uniform was decorated with brightly colored ribbons and insignia of rank. He swore upon the Bible to tell the truth, then proceeded to relate a string of blatant lies. He testified that he had tried to protect Mr. Hardie from us, but that he had been greatly outnumbered and was terrified the women would turn on him if he persisted in his opposition. I jumped to my feet, thinking the judge should know how Colonel Marsh had more than once argued with Mr. Hardie about approaching the other lifeboats and how he had spoken out against him at the trial held by Mrs. Grant; but Mr. Glover pulled me back into my seat, where I sat in stunned silence as the Colonel informed the court that after we had pushed Mr. Hardie out of the boat, we pushed out Mr. Hoffman as well. The Colonel said, “Mr. Hardie presented a threat, all right, not to the women’s safety, but to their status. It was clear from the beginning that Ursula Grant wanted to run things and that Mr. Hardie and his staunch supporter Mr. Hoffman were in the way.”

I fully expected Mr. Preston to set the record straight as to the exact nature of our actions and the role the Colonel had played, but when he finally took the stand, his hands trembled as he put on his spectacles and he seemed unsure of himself. In any case, he was silent on that subject, and I suspect the prosecutor had cautioned him to leave out anything that the Colonel would not corroborate. After a while, he seemed to get his feet under him, and he was nearly his old sure self as he helped the prosecutor establish a timetable of events. He rattled off dates and quantities with great confidence, but without a coherent narrative connecting them, his testimony made little sense to me, and I could see the jury foreman shaking his head in confusion as he tried to keep all the facts and figures straight.

The prosecution’s case against us took only a few days to present, after which it was the turn of the defense. The remaining Italian woman had gone back to Italy. No one knew if she was the one who had poked the bird wing into Mr. Hardie’s eyes or if that had been one of the two who had died, but neither the prosecution nor the defense showed any interest in finding out. That left, besides the three of us, fourteen female survivors, twelve of whom either appeared in person to testify on our behalf or sent in sworn statements. All twelve said that if it weren’t for Hannah and Mrs. Grant they would be dead, even those who admitted that they could not reliably recount the events of that August day because of severe mental and physical exhaustion. Their statements were clearly rehearsed, for they all used the same words and phrases, such as “Mr. Hardie was undeniably insane and a danger to us all” and “Mrs. Grant was an island out there,” or “a harbor,” and Hannah was “the light that guided us to her.” They were unanimous in asserting that “no one raised a hand against Mr. Hoffman, who jumped out of the boat all by himself.”

Listening to them was like listening to the members of a religious sect sing the praises of a beloved leader, and the newspapers dubbed them the Twelve Apostles for their show of unwavering support. Throughout the repetitive testimony, Mrs. Grant gazed at them with her characteristic concern, while Hannah shot them her serene high-priestess smile. This impressed even the judge, for I saw him staring at the two of them, amazed and maybe a little bit under their spell. I couldn’t help thinking that the entire exhibition was an example of the kind of power Mrs. Grant had over people and could only bolster my lawyer’s claims that it was also the kind of power she had over me.

At first the prosecutor pestered the women with questions, trying to break the litany of “I don’t recall” and “a harbor, a light,” but after the third one collapsed in tears, he stopped, realizing, I suppose, that he was the one who came out of it looking uncharitable and intent on causing pain to people who had already suffered enough. By then it must have been plain to everyone that the twelve women were banding together and coordinating their testimony because they thought we needed their protection, and why would we need their protection if we hadn’t done anything wrong? This was an obvious point, and more than once, the members of the jury looked as if they were asking themselves that very question. Equally damning were the forceful lies of Colonel Marsh. Dressed in his full military regalia, the Colonel had made an impressive witness, and if I hadn’t known better, I would have believed him myself.

The only time one of the twelve women strayed from the script was when Mr. Reichmann recalled Greta to the stand and asked her about my relationship with Hannah and Mrs. Grant. He said, “You all have been talking about Hannah West and Ursula Grant almost as if they were one person.”

“They thought alike on many things, and they worked closely together to see that the rest of the women were all right,” said Greta.

“What about the men? Did they tend to the men as well?”

“I think they assumed the men could take care of themselves.”

“But there are three defendants on trial here. Would you include Grace Winter as someone who also worked closely with the other two?”

“Quite the contrary. Grace was very aloof. She seemed to listen more to Mr. Hardie than she did to Mrs. Grant. We speculated that she was uneasy with the idea of a female leader. She was married to a powerful banker, you know, so maybe that explains it. I also thought she might have felt guilty about our predicament since she got into the boat after it was already full. If she was close to anybody, it was Mary Ann.”

Then he showed Greta the letter she had sent to me in which she had written, “The lawyers say I shouldn’t write to you at all, for it might look as if we are conspiring. Tell Mrs. Grant not to worry, though. We all know exactly what to do!” and asked, “Did you and the other women coordinate your testimony?”

“Of course not,” said Greta. Mr. Reichmann’s brilliance was such that it didn’t matter what Greta said in answer to his question, and her denial allowed him to turn to the jury and say: “You see the power Ursula Grant and Hannah West had over these women? Why wouldn’t Grace be subject to the same influence?”

Who would have guessed that on the last day of the prosecution’s rebuttal, Anya Robeson would appear and deliver the most damning testimony of all? She had taken part in nothing. She had not so much as lifted a finger to clear water out of the boat or care for the sick, but when she told this to the jury, it didn’t sound reprehensible because she had the excuse of little Charles.

The prosecutor had provided a model of the lifeboat, complete with forty round holes drilled into it that allowed thirty-nine peglike figures to be placed in the seats. The figures were labeled with the names of the survivors, and he handed several of them to Anya and asked her to place them in the seats they had occupied at the time of Mr. Hardie’s trial. Mr. Reichmann objected to the entire exercise, saying that the forty drilled holes implied that the boat had been built for forty people, when he had established in prior testimony that the lifeboats had been built on a smaller scale than called for in the plans. After the objection was overruled, Anya placed the figure that represented Mary Ann next to the one that represented me. She found slots for Hannah, Mrs. Grant, and Mr. Hardie, then placed herself in the slot just astern of Mary Ann. “They thought I wasn’t aware of anything that was going on because of my preoccupation with my son,” she said, “but I saw everything”; and she went on to damn the three of us. She described how, on orders from Mrs. Grant, Hannah and I had fought with Mr. Hardie, kicking him in the knees and legs until he collapsed in our arms. She told how Mary Ann had fallen away in a dead faint, but that the two of us were more than a match for Mr. Hardie, who had a badly injured arm. One thing she was right about: we had hardly noticed her out there in the boat, but if you think about it, she had managed to save her son, which was the one thing she had set out to do.