The Lifeboat: A Novel (3 page)

I was now one of the ones sitting along the rail being splashed by the oars as the oarsmen tried to hold our position against the current. After thinking about it for a long time, I put my hand down to touch the water. It was very cold and seemed to pull seductively at my fingers, though this effect was not really due to anything about the water and was more a product of the motion of our little boat through it and maybe partly the work of my imagination as well.

BY THE THIRD
day, some of the shock had worn off. The pupils of Maria’s eyes shrank back to normal size, and once she made a clown face at little Charles when he poked his head out from beneath his mother’s skirt. We had traveled far enough that we no longer encountered pieces of the wreckage, or perhaps we had kept our place and it was the debris that had moved. In any case, there was nothing left of the
Empress Alexandra.
She might never have been, but how then to account for our plight? I thought of her as I have often thought of God—responsible for everything, but out of sight and maybe annihilated, splintered on the rocks of his own creation.

The deacon said the experience renewed his faith in God—or if it hadn’t yet, it was bound to; Mrs. Grant said it renewed her conviction that there was no God; and little Mary Ann said, “Hush, hush, it doesn’t matter,” and led everyone in a hymn about those in peril on the sea. We felt uplifted, both tragic and chosen. It touched my heart to see that even Mrs. Grant joined in the singing, so great was our sense of unity and joy at being alive.

If Mary Ann was childlike in her faith in the Bible’s literal truth, I was a practical Anglican. I deemed anything that encouraged people to be moral a good thing, but I never parsed the tenets I believed in from those I didn’t. I thought reverentially of the Bible as the sturdy book with closed covers that sat in my mother’s reading room, where we gathered for our bedtime story. I had a Bible of my own from which I was assigned passages to memorize by the Sunday school mistress, but my book was small and unimpressive, and after my confirmation at the age of eleven, I put it in a drawer and never looked at it again.

Mr. Hardie remained confident, even grimly cheerful. “We’re lucky about the weather,” he said. “The wind is from the southwest and very light. The higher the clouds, the drier the air. The weather will hold.” I’d never wondered about it before and I never wondered about it again, but out there that day I wanted to know why the clouds were white, when they were supposedly made up of water, which is colorless. I asked Mr. Hardie, thinking that he, of all people, would know the answer, but all he said was “The sea is blue or black or all manner of color, and the spray of the breaking waves is white, and they’re made up of water, too.” Mr. Sinclair, whom I had observed rolling about the deck in his wheelchair but had never spoken to, said he wasn’t a scientist, but he had read that the color had to do with the refractive properties of light and the fact that the cold temperatures of the upper atmosphere turned the suspended water droplets into crystals of ice.

Mr. Hardie was on firmer ground with a different sort of fact. He told us that the
Empress Alexandra
had been equipped with twenty lifeboats, that at least ten or eleven of them had been successfully launched, which meant that at least half of the nearly eight hundred people on board had been saved. We could see two of them in the distance, but what had become of the others, we did not know. At first, Mr. Hardie ordered the oarsmen not to go up alongside the other craft, but Colonel Marsh spoke up in favor of approaching close enough to talk to their occupants and to find out if they might contain our loved ones or other people we knew, and my heart leapt at the prospect of seeing my Henry alive and well in one of the other boats. But Hardie said, “What would be the point o’ that, since they can do nothing for us and we can do nothing for them?”

“There is strength in numbers,” said Mr. Preston, which made me laugh despite his earnest demeanor, for he had been an accountant and I thought he was making a joke.

“Shouldn’t we at least see if they’re all right?” argued the Colonel, and Mr. Nilsson agreed, though he was one of those who had helped Mr. Hardie beat the swimmers away from our boat and didn’t strike me as someone too full of concern for his fellow man.

“And what if they’re not?” barked Hardie. “What then? Are we to try to solve their problems as well as our own?” He then muttered that he could tell from this distance that the first boat was as crowded as ours and that the second one wasn’t sitting too well in the water.

“What do you mean by that?” asked Mr. Hoffman.

“Something is off, that’s all.”

While it was natural that Mr. Hardie would seek the counsel of the men sitting nearest him, it began to seem as if theirs were the only opinions that mattered. Mr. Sinclair, who had lost the use of his legs but not of his mind, and the deacon, whose moral authority could not be ignored, were sitting toward the fore and so did not have Hardie’s ear, but at that point they spoke up on behalf of the women. Mr. Sinclair said, “Some people would like to know if their husbands or companions are in those boats.” His voice had a pleasing resonance, which amplified his tone of conviction. The deacon added, “Just yesterday, you were talking about overcrowding. If you are right about the situation in the second boat, it might be possible to transfer some of our people to it.” But his voice lacked force, which had the effect of making the idea he was presenting seem weak and questioning, and even before he finished speaking, Mr. Hardie was shaking his head. “If it were possible for her to take more passengers, don’t you think that some of the people in the overcrowded boat would have moved over to it by now? They’re a lot closer to each other than they are to us.”

“We should at least talk to them,” insisted the Colonel.

“Aye,” said Mr. Hardie after a long pause. “We’ll go within hailing distance, but what we do after that is up to me.”

The oarsmen took up their oars, and I held my breath as we approached the closer of the boats. I was praying to see Henry, yet I didn’t quite dare to hope. Mary Ann whispered to me that she would throw her engagement ring into the sea as an offering if only her mother were in one of the other boats, and I knew that all around me similar bargains were being struck. We were squinting into the sun, so it was difficult to make out faces against the brightness. As we got closer, I recognized Penelope Cumberland, who was someone I had met on the
Empress Alexandra,
but I counted only four men aboard and none of them was Henry. I heard sighs of disappointment as Mr. Hardie shouted out, “That’s far enough. Ship yer oars.”

A man with a full beard called across the water to inquire if we were all right, and he and Mr. Hardie exchanged a few words. “Have ye made contact with the other boat?” Hardie asked him.

“Yes,” said the bearded man, who appeared to be in charge. “The boat’s not half-full, but there’s a crazy ship’s officer on board who says there’s a hole been punched in its bottom. He tried to send some of his people with me, and when I said we couldn’t take them, he threw two of them overboard, so of course we picked them up. You can see our situation for yourself.” And indeed the lifeboat looked as crowded as our own.

“You have no seamen with you, then?” asked Hardie.

“Nay.”

“Have ye found the boxes of supplies that are stowed under the seats?” The man said they had. Then Mr. Hardie went on to say that distress signals and wireless messages had been sent before the ship had gone down and that help in the form of another ship was likely within the next twenty-four hours, forty-eight at most, that he was somewhat surprised it had taken this long, and that it was to our mutual advantage to keep each other in sight for the moment when someone arrived to rescue us.

I did not think to wonder why he had not told us about the wireless messages before, and the men in both boats excitedly asked questions concerning the content of the communications and whether or not any reply had been received. “The ship was on fire—there was hardly time to wait for replies,” barked Hardie. Then he asked if the bearded man knew the name of the officer in the other boat.

“Blake,” said the man, “Mr. Blake is the name of the officer!” And he pointed toward the lifeboat that still bobbed a quarter mile to the east.

“Blake, is it?” said Hardie, more to himself than to the other man, and I thought I saw a shadow cross his eyes, as if this news surprised him more than he let on. Then he said, “Keep us in sight if ye can, and if the weather gets rough, use yer oars to point the nose of the boat into the wind. That’s the best way to ride out a storm.” And with that he ordered our oarsmen to put some distance between us and the other boat.

“Aren’t we going to see who’s in the second boat?” asked the Colonel, and Mr. Hardie said no, he’d seen quite enough.

The Colonel grumbled, but he didn’t argue, and if the others were tempted to side with him against Mr. Hardie in this matter, they remained silent. It now seems to me that failing to band together with the half-empty boat was our biggest mistake. I thought it unlikely that Mr. Blake would throw more people into the water, and the fact that Mr. Hardie knew him seemed as if it would work to our advantage. I have since wondered why Mrs. Grant said nothing. Perhaps she was about to but was forestalled when, in the next moment, the Colonel took up a different line of inquiry. “How do you know so much about what was happening in the radio room of the
Empress Alexandra
?” he asked Mr. Hardie.

“Blake told me about it. When the fire spread, those of us who were belowdecks came topsides to help load people into the boats. That’s when I saw Blake. It was Blake who said, ‘Better go with this lot, mate. They’ll need a seaman aboard if they’re to survive.’” It was then that I had a fleeting memory of seeing Mr. Hardie on the day of the disaster exchanging words with another man. In normal circumstances, I would have said they were arguing, but all around us people were shouting orders and clamoring to be heard. The two men had been similarly dressed, but where Mr. Hardie’s coat had plain sleeves, the sleeves of the other man were festooned with gold brocade. It seemed to me now that it was the man in the gold brocade whom Henry had approached when we first arrived on deck after the explosion. Then Mr. Hardie appeared and I lost track of the officer, who seemed glad to hand us over to Mr. Hardie so he could rush off on other business. I confess that my senses were overwhelmed by the chaos that engulfed us, for the next thing I knew, I was being lifted by strong arms. I caught one last glimpse of Henry’s anxious face as the lifeboat was lowered, and then I never saw him again.

Mr. Hardie said other encouraging things. He told us again that besides being within well-traveled shipping lanes, we were headed toward the Grand Banks, which sounded reassuringly solid to me—like the cliffs of Dover or the marble structure where Henry had worked. “It’s not as if we’re in uncharted water,” said Hardie. But how could it be charted? I thought as I looked around in dismay. There was nothing to distinguish one patch of ocean from another, no landmarks or terrain, only a blue expanse stretching endlessly on all sides of the flimsy speck that was our boat.

I admired Hardie from the start. He had a square jaw and a jutting chin and might have been handsome if not for the toll a life at sea had taken on his features and bearing. His sharp eyes didn’t look shifty or dishonest as one might expect the eyes of a seaman to look. Even within the confines of the boat, he was rarely still. He did not seem frightened by the sea: he respected it, and he alone among us accepted our position. Everyone else fought against it. Mary Ann kept imploring anyone who would listen, “Why us? Why us, dear God? Why us?” while Maria wondered the same thing in her Castilian dialect. The deacon attempted earnest answers to their questions, but Mr. Hardie had little patience with that sort of conversation. “Ye’re born, ye suffer, and ye die. What made ye think ye deserved different?” he wondered aloud when the deacon’s gentle answers failed to quiet them. Colonel Marsh was apt to mutter after each of Hardie’s harsh pronouncements: “He’d never get away with that in the regiment,” as if we might as easily be somewhere else—on land, perhaps, or on horseback, with the Colonel himself leading the charge.

Hardie’s assertions tended to be filled with specifics, whereas those of the Colonel and the deacon and especially of Mrs. Grant were more general and philosophical. Hardie said, “If we’re careful, we have enough food for five days, maybe six,” and I can see now that it was his willingness to quantify our situation, to pin us exactly between the forty-third and forty-fourth parallels, along with the fact that he was absolutely incapable of introspection, that was the source of his power. By contrast, Mrs. Grant uttered vague and meaningless words of comfort. Even so, I liked it when she turned to one or the other of the women and said, “How is your shoulder coming on?” or “Close your eyes for a bit and think nice thoughts.” The deacon had taken it upon himself to search his store of instructive Bible verses and share them with the rest of us. I found it irritating, but Isabelle Harris, a serious woman who had been traveling with her ailing mother, kept turning to him and saying things like “Isn’t there something in Deuteronomy?” and the deacon would oblige by quoting: “Every place whereon the soles of your feet shall tread shall be yours: from the wilderness even unto the uttermost sea shall your coast be.”

That morning, a feeling of camaraderie pervaded the boat. We had seen what a boat without Mr. Hardie in it was like, and we counted our blessings that we had been vouchsafed a leader who knew about wind direction and weather patterns. He wore a knife in a greasy sheath that hung down from his belt. He had salvaged the floating barrels, which I had considered such an extravagance at the time. Who else of us had thought of anything on that first disastrous day but saving ourselves for the next ten minutes? Only the deacon and Anya Robeson had any matching claim to selflessness. The deacon had spoken up on behalf of the child, and Anya’s little Charlie was hidden under her coat, and we all knew she would willingly die a thousand deaths for him. Perhaps Mrs. Grant was selfless too, for she was always stretching a hand out for someone to hold or turning her unsmiling face, with its fixed look of deep compassion and concern, toward one or another of the women.

As I said, the shock had worn off, or was, more accurately, suppressed. We used up precious breath singing and laughing and talking about whatever came into our heads. Mr. Hardie started off a round of stories by saying, “Do any of ye know how the
Empress Alexandra
came to be named?” He proceeded to tell us that the ship had been christened on the day Nicholas and Alexandra were crowned as emperor and empress of all of Russia. Mr. Sinclair added that the match had been forbidden by Nicholas’s father, but the father died and the couple quickly wed. “The coronation, however, was delayed for more than a year. When it finally took place, thousands of peasants were trampled to death during the celebrations in a panic over food. Nicholas assumed the grand ball being thrown in his honor would be canceled out of respect for the victims of the tragedy, but it wasn’t, and he was counseled to attend in order not to offend his French hosts. The incident was variously used to prove the ill-fated nature of Nicholas’s reign and the heartlessness of autocratic rule.”