The Wild Dark Flowers (27 page)

“He says not to lower the boats.”

“Why, why?” screamed a man at the officer’s side. “Get the women in, get the children in, she’s going down!”

“She’s not going down,” the officer retorted. “She’s aground.” He started pushing and pulling his way to the front of the crowd. “Everybody out of the boats!”

The man who had screamed that they were sinking now turned and looked John straight in the eye. “The bow’s submerging,” he said, in a low, brutal voice—a murderous voice of fury. “Can’t they see it? She’s not aground. She’s going under.”

There was chaos as the officers began pulling passengers who had fought their way to a lifeboat out of them. John saw one regally dressed woman, still in a massive fur coat, and her hat tied on with a blue chiffon scarf, resisting the command. “Take your hands off me! Take your hands off me!” The lifeboat was shaking, swinging. Other passengers clung on to its rails.

John saw the man ahead of him go to the side of the boat and pull a revolver from the inner pocket of his jacket. He pointed it at the officer. “If you don’t lower that boat, I’ll fire this,” he said. “I mean what I say. I’ll kill you. My wife is in that boat.”

John pulled at Annalisa and Joseph. “Come with me,” he said to them. “Let’s try the other side.”

“What did that man say?” Annalisa said. She had begun to cry.

“Never mind,” John told her.

He pushed; he shoved. And was shoved back in return. Passengers were trying to go both ways, to either side of the boat. Someone hit him hard on the back; it felt like a fist, but he was too tightly hemmed in to turn around.

In the wailing scrum of the crowd, Joseph’s voice came calmly and clearly at his side. “Do you know how many boats there are?”

“No, I don’t,” John said. “But there’ll be enough.” His heart was hammering at his rib cage in panic. The blank sun-white sea looked nearer. Under his feet, he thought he felt another, more muted, explosion.

“There are twenty-two clinker-built and twenty-six collapsibles,” Joseph said.

In surprise, John looked down at him. It was the sort of fact a typical boy would seize on: how many lifeboats, how many engines, how many decks.

“Well, that’s plenty,” John said, trying to smile.

“We shall be quite safe,” Joseph informed him.

It was barely ten minutes since the ship had been struck. When they got to the starboard side, John saw that some people were leaping across the gap to get into wildly swinging boats. Others hung back, looking at the eight or nine feet between them and the boats, and then staring down below at the sea some eighty or ninety feet below. John glanced over the side and thought it was a hell of a way to fall, and, in that instant, he realized that he had no life preserver.
I’m going to die,
he thought. It was simply true. He stood watching the boats and saw people rushing back to the port side, now so much higher than the starboard. But simple reason showed that a boat would be much harder to launch from the port than the starboard.

To his left-hand side, some twenty yards away, he suddenly glimpsed Robert Matthews standing with Annie at the rail. They were clasping each other, but nothing about their body language suggested that Annie was preparing to get in a lifeboat. They were looking down at the sea, her head on Robert’s shoulder. As he was swept on with the crowd, John glanced back. Robert was saying something to Annie; he raised her hand to his and kissed it. John couldn’t help but think of Annie’s anxiety while they had waited in the Customs Hall in New York. Both he and Robert had reassured her; perhaps they had even made a little fun of her worries. He regretted that now; he wished that he could apologize to her. In the next second, in the crush, he lost sight of them completely.

He pushed his way towards a boat that was already loaded with women and children, some screaming, some crying, others white and mute with shock as the boat hung precipitously over the ship’s side. “Let these children on!” he shouted.

Annalisa stopped moving. “I can’t get on without Mother,” she protested.

He shoved her unceremoniously towards the side. “I promise I’ll find your mother,” he said. “Just get in the boat.”

She looked at him. “Mother is not there,” she said. “She’s not in that boat. You’re lying to me; you won’t look for her at all.” She had become rigid, elbows tucked into her sides, hands clenched. He pushed her, but she would not budge an inch.

John turned to her brother. “Joseph,” he said, “you must get your sister into the boat, and follow her. Do you understand?”

Joseph said nothing. But he nodded.

The ship was groaning. The Marconi wires and the lines from the funnels were making an infernal straining sound; from below came something monstrous, a combined rushing and crashing noise as furniture was churned to the starboard side in all the public rooms. They were descending faster now; the lower decks must be all but submerged, he thought. And it had only been minutes since they were struck. How many, twelve, thirteen? Surely not more than that. . . .

Men were trying to heave the two-ton lifeboat outwards, but they were just ordinary passengers.
Where are the crew?
John wondered. And realized that they must be belowdecks, trapped. There was no one who knew what they were doing. No one.

He shoved Annalisa and Joseph to the rail and held Annalisa up. She kicked against the deck, against his legs, crying,
No, no
, and, just as he had decided to lower her back down, a man grabbed her and flung her outwards. She landed in the boat and a handful of women caught her. “Now you,” John said to Joseph. “Be quick, be quick.”

But Joseph had caught hold of the rail. “I can’t do that,” he said.

“It’s only a few feet.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean ladies first, and little kids. But I’m not little. I’m twelve.”

John looked into his pitifully earnest face. The boy was not budging. He put an arm round his shoulder. “All right,” he conceded. “If it comes to it, we grown-up fellows will jump together.”

Joseph simply nodded. “She’s in boat twelve,” he said quietly. “We shall have to remember. Annalisa is in boat twelve.”

Keeping an arm around him, John watched two men and a woman climb the rope falls to get into the boat. They scuttled like crabs, clinging to each other, none of them wearing lifebelts. A man was standing on the
Lusitania
’s rail, trying to place his foot on the rail of the lifeboat; it began to dip at the bows from the weight of the passengers crawling on the rope falls. An officer shouted, “Let her go faster by the stern.”

John switched his gaze from the boat to Annalisa’s face. “Joseph,” she was calling. “Joseph.”

All at once, the lifeboat dipped at the stern.
They’ve corrected it too fast
, John thought. And, in the next instant, the lifeboat tipped and went straight down, eighty feet stern-first, throwing passengers out as it fell.

It was a matter of a split second; John leaned out in horror; the boat was upside down, with a few bodies in the water, and the scattered faces of a few others rising to the surface of the sea. Annalisa had vanished, together with the women who had been holding her.

He struggled to keep upright; all around them came the screams and shouts of those simultaneously trying to launch boat fourteen. He stared at it now as it was lowered about halfway down, the passengers on it realizing that they were swinging now over the upturned hull of boat twelve, which had been dragged back in the current by the
Lusitania
’s dogged listing speed. To one side of him he glimpsed, rather than saw, a flailing of arms, a tangled shouting scrum, agonized yells as the ropes broke free of boat fourteen. It fell straight down, landing on top of those desperately floundering in the water out of boat twelve.

He turned Joseph away, pressed him to his own body, trying to obliterate the scene.

Farther down the deck, boat eighteen suddenly swung inwards, smashing against the superstructure of the
Lusitania
, crushing a crowd of people who were standing there. He got down on his knees and made the boy face him. “Listen to me, Joseph,” he said. “Look me in the face. Don’t look anywhere else. Don’t listen to anything else. Listen to me, just to me, okay?”

“Yes,” Joseph answered.

“Pretty soon the ship’s going to go over,” John told him. “When she’s going, we’ll jump up on that rail and we’ll wait for the water to come over our feet, and then we’ll swim. We’ll swim like madmen, okay? There’ll be things in the water—people, things from the ship, but don’t you look at them, okay? You’re going to swim quicker than you’ve ever done. Make for a lifeboat or a floating chair or a collapsible. Something like that. Do you hear me?”

Joseph was solemnly staring straight at him, ignoring the hell around them. “Yes,” he said. “I hear.”

“All right, then,” John muttered, getting up and taking hold of his hand. “All right, then, all right. . . .”

Fear smothered him, making him gasp.

Somewhere even now he could hear an officer shouting that the ship wouldn’t sink.

Way down the starboard deck, he suddenly saw Charles Lauriat jump into a lifeboat and set to like a wild man trying to free its after falls; at the other end, a steward was hacking away at the thick ropes with nothing better than a pocket knife. He saw Lauriat begin to shout at the occupants, but there was no time left. John could see plainly what he was trying to tell them—that the boat was still attached to the ship and would go down with her. They had only seconds to get out. But nobody seemed to be moving at all. They were clinging to the stuff in the boat—the oars, the kegs of water, the boat hooks, the sails, as if the clutter could help them. Above them all, the four massive funnels of the
Lusitania
loomed ever further over, scattering a huge volume of dust and soot. He saw Lauriat climb onto the lifeboat rail and jump.

He looked away. He thought of Octavia. It was the last coherent thought before the end. He saw her face languidly smiling underneath him, he saw the long green lawns of Rutherford; he was at her side again that very first morning in the library.

Images of her enveloped him in a wholesale rush. He thought of her lying with him in the woodland far above Rutherford’s parkland. He thought of her hands on him. All the secrets she had told him: her abusive, insulting father; her grief at the realization that it had been money, and not love, that had made William marry her; her joy at the children—running down to the river and helping Harry to fish when he was just a little boy—summer sun on water . . . on water . . .

And then it happened.

The stuff of his nightmares, the scene he had dreaded for years, the imagined terror when he had read about the
Titanic
and the
Empress
. It came rolling wildly towards him now; not the soft whispering water of Rutherford, but the shocking cold of the Atlantic. The sea was suddenly up to the rail.

“Now!” he shouted to Joseph, and hauled on the boy’s hand. But at his side he could feel that Joseph was already climbing, almost casually, and he saw the boy’s face level with his own for a split second. The water boiled over them; and he felt Joseph’s hand dragged through his, his fingernails scoring along John’s palm.

And then he was gone. Then everything was gone. John was underwater, and felt his foot caught in the rail as he went down, down, down. He kicked furiously; it came free, and in the next instant a rope wound itself around his body. Maniacally he pulled at it. It was like being in the coils of a snake. He felt extraordinary pressure on his eardrums and opened his eyes.

The sea was a green whirlpool. Past him went torn shapes of chairs, oars, bodies, clothes. In the surreal and ever-growing darkness, a dead man floated past him, and his bloodied hand slapped John’s face and snatched through his hair. In the next moment, he was hit by the body’s leather-booted foot. It caught him under the chin, and he bit through his own tongue with the force of it.

The suction was appalling; the
Lusitania
was going straight to the bottom like an arrow. He felt the ship move past him, a monster groaning through the deeps, and he put out his hand and he felt her painted side, her enormous bulk, with his fingertips, a sensation of such strange intimacy that he believed he was already dead.

He was alongside the dropping, dropping ship; ever further, floating weightless in the dark, caught in her intimate embrace.

D
avid Nash walked from the tiny railway station at Wasthwaite all the way to Rutherford. It had taken some time to extricate himself from the congratulations of the station master, Baddeley, who had insisted on shaking his hand and introducing him to every bemused passenger waiting for the three o’clock train to York.

It was ironic, because Baddeley had never used to like him much; once, standing by when David had dropped a piece of luggage, he had even called him a “nancy boy.” Apparently, though, David wasn’t such an embarrassment now. Or perhaps it was just the uniform. Even snotty-nosed little boys had saluted the uniform as he had made his way here today from Lancashire.

He reached Rutherford’s gates just as the afternoon began to cloud over. He stood at the entrance to the long, beech-lined drive, and he felt suddenly overcome by sentiment. He didn’t know when he would be coming here again—and he felt that this was much more his home than the house in the village a couple of miles back.

He had worked here for twelve years, coming here as a hallboy. Lord Cavendish had approved of him, and Bradfield had taken a sort of shine to him—and—well, all the rest was history. Through all those years, Rutherford had fed and clothed and educated him: it was in Lord Cavendish’s library that he had first picked up a volume of poetry, and Shakespeare’s plays, and Plato’s
Republic
. He had read Dante’s
Inferno
here through the course of one winter, page by stolen page in candlelight when everyone else had gone to bed. He had read all the Romantic poets through the length of one glorious spring; and struggled through
Paradise Lost
that same autumn. It had been much more of an education to him than the hapless efforts of the village school. The words had played like a beautiful and secret orchestra in his mind, and, as a consequence, he had Rutherford to thank for his own poems, poor as they were. He would never forget that.

Halfway up the drive, he cut quickly across the lawns of the lower terrace and circled around to the back of the house through the kitchen gardens. As he got to the back door, it began to rain, and he walked quickly into the corridor by the laundry, brushing the droplets from the shoulders of his greatcoat.

He looked up, and was surprised to see Mary Richards standing there watching him. She was out of breath.

“I saw you come up the drive,” she said. “I ran down from the drawing room. I’m meant to be cleaning.” She laughed, and added in a whisper, “For the fortieth time. She’s possessed, that woman.” Then she glanced over her shoulder, back along the kitchen corridor. “If she catches me, I shall be for it,” she said, and looked back at him.

He’d never so much as held her hand. Not for more than a moment, anyway. But the fact that she was out of breath, the fact that she had run down to meet him, and now stood, plainly embarrassed at herself—Mary Richards, of all people, lost for words, playing helplessly with the tie on her pinafore apron, and such a glad expression on her face—God, it gave him courage.

He walked straight over to her, and put his arms around her, and kissed her. He fully expected her to resist him, to push him away. But she returned his kiss, and, when they parted, she held on to him.

“I thought you might not like it,” he said.

She smiled at him. “Not like it?” she said. “Tha’s bakk’ud in coming for’add, lad.”
You’re backward in coming forward.
He laughed out loud. It was a sign that the feisty little termagant he’d known so long, who could slay you with a look if you so much as stepped out of line, was moved so much that she had clean forgotten that she was a parlor maid, and slipped straight back into her broadest Yorkshire accent.

“Like the uniform, then?” he asked.

“It’s not the uniform I like, it’s the man in it,” she told him.

“Maybe I should always have been forward, then,” he said. “Like Harrison.”

“If you’d been forward like Harrison, I wouldn’t give you the time of day,” she told him decisively. She turned and walked briskly along the corridor, then looked back at him. “Well, don’t stand there with your mouth open,” she said. “You’ll catch flies.”

Grinning, he followed her to the kitchen. “Look who’s here, Mrs. Carlisle,” Mary called out. The cook looked up from her work, and a beaming smile came to her face. “Well, lad! Look at you! You look proper fine,” she said, hands on hips and assessing him.

Shyly, he took off his cap.

“That’s right, sit yer’sen down,” Mrs. Carlisle said. “You too, Mary.”

“Oh, I daren’t.”

“It’s half past five, and past teatime,” Mrs. Carlisle said. “Where’s the others?”

“She’s got them doing all sorts. Donkey-stoning the flight of steps at the main door, and scrubbing the hall; doing the paintings with a fine brush. All sorts.”

Mrs. Carlisle looked levelly at David. “Mrs. Jocelyn has taken a bit of turn,” she told him. “We do what she says. But I shan’t be bullied.”

“I ought to go back up,” Mary murmured. She still had not sat down.

“You’ll do no such thing,” Mrs. Carlisle replied. “You’ll sit down for a pot of tea and the seed cake I’ve made this morning. Take down that tin on the shelf there, and bring the plates.”

“But . . .”

“If she comes in here, I’ll speak to her,” the cook replied. “It’s not every day one of our chaps comes back to see us. Lord Cavendish would have him up to talk to him, if he were here.”

“He’s not at home?”

“No, lad. They’ve gone to London, him and her ladyship, and Miss Charlotte. Amelie and Cooper too, of course. Miss Louisa is still here. She’s taken a shine to the bairn.” She took the kettle from the range and made the tea.

“That’s not all she’s taken a shine to,” Mary said, and nudged David with her arm. He raised an eyebrow inquiringly.

“Tush, tush. No more,” Mrs. Carlisle reprimanded.

Mary, after hesitating another moment, sat down next to David. “We’ve had such a to-do,” she told him. “Master Harry is coming back from France, and they’ve gone down to the London house to meet him.”

“Do you know any more on his injury?” Mary had written to David that Harry had been shot down; he had received the letter only a day or two ago, just before he had been given leave.

“No, not really. They don’t tell us much, of course. Amelie said just before she went that her ladyship was very happy about him coming back, though. She cried and everything.”

“Well, she’s got feelings like the rest of us, I suppose,” Mrs. Carlisle said.

David took the offered cup of tea gratefully. He couldn’t remember when he had last eaten or had a hot drink. He had been traveling for nine hours. They had only told him at eight o’clock this morning that he had forty-eight hours’ leave before the regiment moved on to another training ground. “And what’s this about Miss Louisa?”

Mary, glancing at Mrs. Carlisle, said nothing. The cook was holding her gaze with a warning look. But then when Mrs. Carlisle looked away, busying herself by cutting the cake for them, Mary mouthed, “Jack,” in David’s direction. He widened his eyes to show his surprise. Under the lip of the table, Mary wound her fingers together in a sort of knot by way of illustration, and smothered a smile.

“By heck,” David murmured. “A man can’t go away for two minutes in this place.”

Mrs. Carlisle looked up. “What’s that?”

“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head in bemusement as he took his plate.

They all sat companionably together for a few moments, and then Mrs. Carlisle abruptly pushed back her chair and got to her feet. “I shall go and find those girls. This won’t do.”

It was unheard-of for a cook to leave her own domain and go up to the main house, unless summoned. It was trespass, for a start, on the housekeeper’s territory.

“Oh, do you think you ought?” Mary asked.

“I’ve had about enough of this,” Mrs. Carlisle replied. “I shall be back as soon as I find her. Those girls and Hardy are entitled to a sit-down at five. Donkey-stoning the steps, indeed! I never heard of such a thing. They’re Portland stone, they don’t need whitening. Anyone would think we’re a mill terrace—that’s what they do in those back-to-back streets. Donkey-stoning! It’s nonsense.”

They watched her leave, still muttering to herself. They heard her go along the stone corridor and tap on Mrs. Jocelyn’s door, and then, farther on, at Mr. Bradfield’s. They heard his door open, a few exchanged words, and then the door closed again.

“He’s let her in,” Mary said, surprised. Mr. Bradfield’s room was the inner sanctum. She gave David a smile. “It’s been very strange,” she admitted. “Mrs. Jocelyn . . . well, she isn’t right. She’s up and down stairs all day, over and over. She goes in all the rooms and walks around them.”

“Mrs. Carlisle’s right about those steps, though. It’ll ruin the look of them.”

“We know it. But what can you do? She goes on and on about things being clean. And she prays all the time.”

“She always did.”

“I know. But it’s loudly now. We can hear her from here. “Lord, strike down Thy enemies,” and all that. It’s right frightening, David.” She paused. “And she goes on about his lordship in a funny way.”

“What do you mean?”

Mary bit her lip. “How good he is, and how she’s always served him since before he married Lady Octavia.”

“Well, I suppose that’s all true.”

“It’s just the
way
she says it. And the way she talks about her ladyship. She’s called her a sinner, here in this very room, in front of all of us.”

“Why? What’s her ladyship sinned over?”

“Mr. Gould last year . . .”

“Ah, that,” David murmured. “She ought to know her Bible if anyone does,” he mused. “Let him that is without sin cast the first stone, and all that.”

Mary smiled broadly. “What sins do you think Mrs. Jocelyn has, then?”

“Coveting another woman’s husband, by the sound of it.”

“David!”

“You don’t think so?”

She considered. “I don’t suppose it’s our place to think about it at all.”

They sat in silence awhile, then he slowly took her hand. “And what about your father?”

“He’s coming tomorrow. We got word. That’s another thing she doesn’t like. It’s because her ladyship asked for him.” She paused, eyeing him. “She hit me over it.”

“Hit you!”

“She slapped my face. Said I had gone behind her back, or some such thing.”

Blood rushed to David’s face. His first instinct was to go and find Mrs. Jocelyn for himself; he half rose, but Mary pulled him back down. “It doesn’t matter. She’s a bit off her head, like Mrs. Carlisle says.”

“All the same,” he told her. “It’s not right. Things are changing all over, Mary. People like us needn’t stand for it anymore. You’ll see what I mean when the war’s over. You can’t have men fighting and seeing their mates dying and then come back and it’s all the same. They’ll take orders from officers, but to take orders afterwards . . . well, I reckon it’ll stick in the throats of most folk.”

“We need to work.”

“Aye, but not to be treated badly. You know what I mean. You saw the mills. They’ve not much changed.”

“Her ladyship ordered all the children out. It caused a fuss over there,” Mary said. “But soon after, the women went to the gates and said they couldn’t survive without the wages. Two days later, the overseers brought all the children back. I don’t even know if her ladyship knows about that.”

“She’ll know when she comes back.”

“I’ve heard say that they won’t take orders from her.”

David smiled slowly. “Well, after all, she’s only a woman.”

Mary gave him a playful slap. “Some women aren’t to be trifled with, my lad.”

“Lord, I know that.”

Then, “But I’m more bothered about Father,” Mary continued, frowning. “I sent word to the mill and I asked the men to make sure he was tidy, and keep drink from him. But I don’t know if they will have done. They’ve probably sent him off with a few jars at the pub. I’m that worried about it.”

“I can stay till tomorrow. Do you want me to talk to him?”

“Oh,” she said, and she blushed. “Till tomorrow. That’s good.”

They sat in silence for a while, smiling at each other. Eventually, she said, “You write such a nice letter, David.”

“You like them?”

“I’m sure it’s not all what you make it out to be, though.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, as if it’s fun.”

“It isn’t. But you’ve got to see the bright side. And we have some games, and concerts sometimes. They’ve got me playing football. I can’t say I’m much good at it.”

“Oh, David,” she murmured, looking down at their joined hands. “We’ve been reading the paper . . . you know about the Kents?”

“Yes. But don’t think that’s going to happen to me.”

She looked up at him with a critical, determined look on her face. “We have to get a few things straight, you and me.”

“Such as?”

“Such as not telling me a lot of rubbish. You don’t know if it’ll happen to you or not. I’m not stupid, David. So don’t tell me any kind of silly story that’s it’s all going to be all right, when it might not be.”

“Well, thanks for the vote of confidence.”

She gripped his hand tightly. “If it were just you, I know you’d hold on till hell froze over,” she said. “I know you’d face down anything. But it isn’t a choice like that, is it? It’s bloody murder out there, David, and you know it.”