Three Fates (3 page)

With pain radiating through him, he snagged a floating plank and pulled his upper body onto it. He laid his cheek on the wood, breathed deeply, wept quietly.

And saw the
Lusitania
was gone.

The plate of water where she’d been was raging, thrashing and belching smoke. Belching bodies, he saw with a dull horror. He’d been one of them, only moments before. But fate had spared him.

While he watched, while he struggled to block out the screams and stay sane, the water went calm as glass. With the last of his strength, he pulled himself onto the plank. He heard the shrill song of sea gulls, the weeping prayers or weeping cries of those who floundered or floated in the water with him.

Probably freeze to death, he thought as he drifted in and out of consciousness. But it was better than drowning.

 

 

IT WAS THE cold that brought him out of the faint. His body was racked with it, and every trickling breeze was a new agony. Hardly daring to move, he tugged at his sopping and ruined steward’s jacket. Bright pain had nausea rolling greasily in his belly. He ran an unsteady hand over his face and saw the wet wasn’t water, but blood.

His laugh was wild and shaky. So what would it be, freezing or bleeding to death? Drowning might have been better, after all. It would be over that way. He slowly shed the jacket—something wrong with his shoulder, he thought absently—and used the ruined jacket to wipe the blood from his face.

He didn’t hear so much shouting now. There were still some thin screams, some moans and prayers, but most of the passengers who’d made it as far as he had were dead. And silent.

He watched a body float by. It took him a moment to recognize the face, as it was bone-white and covered with bloodless gashes.

Wyley. Good Christ.

For the first time since the nightmare had begun, he felt for the weight in his pocket. He felt the lump of what he’d stolen from the man currently staring up at the sky with blank blue eyes.

“You won’t need it,” Felix said between chattering teeth, “but I swear before God if I had it to do over, I wouldn’t have stolen from you in the last moments of your life. Seems like robbing a grave.”

His long-lapsed religious training had him folding his hands in prayer. “If I end up dying here today, I’ll apologize in person if we end up on the same side of the gate. And if I live I take a vow to try to reform. No point in saying I’ll do it, but I’ll give doing an honest day’s work a try.”

He passed out again, and woke to the sound of an engine. Dazed, numb, he managed to lift his head. Through his wavering vision, he saw a boat, and through the roaring in his ears, heard the shouts and voices of men.

He tried to call out, but managed only a hacking cough. “I’m alive.” His voice was only a croak, whisked away by the breeze. “I’m still alive.”

He didn’t feel the hands pull him onto the fishing trawler called
Dan O’Connell.
Was delirious with chills and pain when he was wrapped in a blanket, when hot tea was poured down his throat. He would remember nothing about his actual rescue, nor learn the names of the men whose arms had hauled him to safety. Nothing came clear to him until he woke, nearly twenty-four hours after the torpedo had struck the liner, in a narrow bed in a small room with sunlight streaming through a window.

He would never forget the first sight that greeted him when his vision cleared.

She was young and pretty, with eyes of misty blue and a scatter of gold freckles over her small nose and round cheeks. Her hair was fair and piled on top of her head in some sort of knot that seemed to be slipping. Her mouth bowed up when she glanced over at him, and she rose quickly from the chair where she’d been darning socks.

“There you are. I wonder if you’ll stay with us this time around.”

He heard Ireland in her voice, felt the strong hand lift his head. And he smelled a drift of lavender.

“What . . .” The old, croaking sound of his voice appalled him. His throat felt scorched, his head stuffed with rags of dirty cotton.

“Just take this first. It’s medicine the doctor left for you. You’ve pneumonia, he says, and a fair gash on your head that’s been stitched. Seems you tore something in your shoulder as well. But you’ve come through the worst, sir, and you rest easy for we’ll see you through.”

“What . . . happened? The ship . . .”

The pretty mouth went flat and hard. “The bloody Germans. ’Twas a U-boat torpedoed you. And they’ll writhe in hell for it, for the people they murdered. The babies they slaughtered.”

Though a tear trickled down her cheek, she managed to slide the medicine into him competently. “You have to rest. Your life’s a miracle, for there are more than a thousand dead.”

“A . . .” He managed to grip her wrist as the horror stabbed through him. “A
thousand?
”

“More than. You’re in Queenstown now, and as well as you can be.” She tilted her head. “An American, are you?”

Close enough, he decided, as he hadn’t seen the shores of his native England in more than twelve years. “Yes. I need—”

“Tea,” she interrupted. “And broth.” She moved to the door to shout: “Ma! He’s waked and seems to want to stay that way.” She glanced back. “I’ll be back with something warm in a minute.”

“Please. Who are you?”

“Me?” She smiled again, wonderfully sunny. “I’d be Meg. Meg O’Reiley, and you’re in the home of my parents, Pat and Mary O’Reiley, where you’re welcome until you’re mended. And your name, sir?”

“Greenfield. Felix Greenfield.”

“God bless you, Mr. Greenfield.”

“Wait . . . there was a woman, and a little boy. Cunningham.”

Pity moved over her face. “They’re listing names. I’ll check on them for you when I’m able. Now you rest, and we’ll get you some tea.”

When she went out, he turned his face toward the window, toward the sun. And saw, sitting on the table under it, the money that had been in his pocket, the garnet earbobs. And the bright silver glint of the little statue.

Felix laughed until he cried.

 

 

HE LEARNED THE O’Reileys made their living from the sea. Pat and his two sons had been part of the rescue effort. He met them all, and her younger sister as well. For the first day he was unable to keep any of them straight in his mind. But for Meg herself.

He clung to her company as he’d clung to the plank, to keep from sliding into the dark again.

“Tell me what you know,” he begged her.

“It’ll be hard for you to hear it. It’s hard to speak it.” She moved to his window, looked out at the village where she’d lived all of her eighteen years. Survivors such as Felix were being tended to in hotel rooms, in the homes of neighbors. And the dead, God rest them, were laid in temporary morgues. Some would be buried, some would be sent home. Others would forever be in the grave of the sea.

“When I heard of it,” she began, “I almost didn’t believe it. How could such a thing be? There were trawlers out, and they went directly to try to rescue survivors. More boats set out from here. Most were too late to do more than bring back the dead. Oh sweet God, I saw myself some of the people as they made land. Women and babies, men barely able to walk and half naked. Some cried, and others just stared. Like you do when you’re lost. They say the liner went down in less than twenty minutes. Can that be?”

“I don’t know,” Felix murmured, and shut his eyes.

She glanced back at him and hoped he was strong enough for the rest. “More have died since coming here. Exposure and injuries too grievous to heal. Some spent hours in the water. The lists change so quick. I can’t think what terror of heart families are living with, waiting to know. Or what grief those who know their loved ones are lost in this horrible way are feeling. You said there was no one waiting for word of you.”

“No. No one.”

She went to him. She’d tended his hurts, suffered with him during the horrors of his delirium. It had been only three days since he’d been brought into her care, but for both of them, it was a lifetime.

“There’s no shame in staying here,” she said quietly. “No shame in not going to the funeral today. You’re far from well yet.”

“I need to go.” He looked down at his borrowed clothes. In them he felt scrawny and fragile. And alive.

 

 

THE QUIET WAS almost unearthly. Every shop and store in Queenstown was closed for the day. No children raced along the streets, no neighbors stopped to chat or gossip. Over the silence came the hollow sound of church bells from St. Colman’s on the hill, and the mournful notes of the funeral dirge.

Felix knew if he lived another hundred years he’d never forget the sounds of that grieving music, the soft and steady beat of drums. He watched the sun strike the brass of the instruments, and remembered how that same sun had struck the brass of the propellers as the stern of the
Lusitania
had reared up in her final plunge into the sea.

He was alive, he thought again. Instead of relief and gratitude, he felt only guilt and despair.

He kept his head down as he trudged along behind the priests, the mourners, the dead, through the reverently silent streets. It took more than an hour to reach the graveyard, and left him light-headed. By the time he saw the three mass graves beneath tall elms where choirboys stood with incense burners, he was forced to lean heavily on Meg.

Tears stung the backs of his eyes as he looked at the tiny coffins that held dead children.

He listened to the quiet weeping, to the words of both the Catholic and the Church of Ireland services. None of it reached him. He could still hear, thought he would forever hear, the way people had called to God as they’d drowned. But God hadn’t listened, and had let them die horribly.

Then he lifted his head and, across those obscene holes, saw the face of the woman and young boy from the ship.

The tears came now, fell down his cheeks like rain as he lurched through the crowd. He reached her as the first notes of “Abide with Me” lifted into the air. Then he fell to his knees in front of her wheelchair.

“I feared you were dead.” She reached up, touched his face with one hand. The other peeked out of a cast. “I never got your name, so couldn’t check the lists.”

“You’re alive.” Her face had been cut, he could see that now, and her color was too bright, as if she were feverish. Her leg had been cast as well as her arm. “And the boy.”

The child slept in the arms of another woman. Like an angel, Felix thought again. Peaceful and unmarked.

The fist of despair that gripped him loosened. One prayer, at least one prayer, had been answered.

“He never let go.” She began to weep then, soundlessly. “He’s such a good boy. He never let go. I broke my arm in the fall. If you hadn’t given me your life jacket, we would have drowned. My husband . . .” Her voice frayed as she looked over at the graves. “They never found him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“He would have thanked you.” She reached up to touch a hand to her boy’s leg. “He loved his son, very much.” She took a deep breath. “In his stead, I thank you, for my son’s life and my own. Please tell me your name.”

“Felix Greenfield, ma’am.”

“Mr. Greenfield.” She leaned over, brushed a kiss on Felix’s cheek. “I’ll never forget you. Nor will my son.”

When they wheeled her chair away, she kept her shoulders straight with a quiet dignity that brought a wash of shame over Felix’s face.

“You’re a hero,” Meg told him.

Shaking his head, he moved as quickly as he could away from the crowds, away from the graves. “No. She is. I’m nothing.”

“How can you say that? I heard what she said. You saved her life, and the little boy’s.” Concerned, she hurried up to him, took his arm to steady him.

He’d have shaken her off if he’d had the strength. Instead, he simply sat in the high, wild grass of the graveyard and buried his face in his hands.

“Ah, there now.” Pity for him had her sitting beside him, taking him into her arms. “There now, Felix.”

He could think of nothing but the strength in the young widow’s face, in the innocence of her son’s. “She was hurt, so she asked me to take the boy. To save the boy.”

“You saved them both.”

“I don’t know why I did it. I was only thinking about saving myself. I’m a thief. Those things you took out of my pocket? I stole them. I was stealing them when the ship was hit. All I could think about when it was happening was getting out alive.”

Meg shifted beside him, folded her hands. “Did you give her your life jacket?”

“It wasn’t mine. I found it. I don’t know why I gave it to her. She was trapped between deck chairs, holding on to the boy. Holding on to her sanity in the middle of all that hell.”

“You could’ve turned away from her, saved yourself.”

He mopped at his eyes. “I wanted to.”

“But you didn’t.”

“I’ll never know why.” He only knew that seeing them alive had changed something inside him. “But the point is, I’m a second-rate thief who was on that ship because I was running from the cops. I stole a man’s things minutes before he died. A thousand people are dead. I saw some of them die. I’m alive. What kind of world is it that saves a thief and takes children?”

“Who can answer? But there’s a child who’s alive today because you were there. Would you have been, do you think, just where you were, when you were, if you hadn’t been stealing?”

He let out a derisive sound. “The likes of me wouldn’t have been anywhere near the first-class deck unless I’d been stealing.”

“There you are.” She took a handkerchief from her pocket and dried his tears as she would a child’s. “Stealing’s wrong. It’s a sin and there’s no question about it. But if you’d been minding your own, that woman and her son would be dead. If a sin saves innocent lives, I’m thinking it’s not so great a sin. And I have to say, you didn’t steal so very much if all you had for it were a pair of earbobs, a little statue and some American dollars.”