But, he now understood, you couldn’t put armaments on a ship as casually as if they were bolts of cotton, though he still didn’t know what had triggered the explosion. The crates should have been safe enough. He had been assured they were properly packed; he’d assumed they were properly stowed. Something else must have gone wrong, but there was no way to know what. Some freak thing. Something that could not quite have been his own fault, not directly.
“It happened because I didn’t break the bottle,” Matilda had said in the days after. “I cursed the ship.”
“It had nothing to do with you.”
“You shouldn’t have named it after that girl.”
“You’re right,” he’d said. “I am sorry.”
He could not remember ever apologizing to her before. Her pregnancy had been a buoy to which they’d clung during the first shock of the Josephina, the horror brought by the ringing of the telephone before dawn, the telegrammed counts of the rescued and the lost, the lists of names, the painful revisions to the counts and the lists, the photographs from the crowded decks of the freighters that had picked up survivors, including one of Addison Graves, alive, with his two babies.
Lloyd had known at once that Addison would absorb the worst of the public’s rage （“Captain Cowardice,” the press had dubbed him） and also that he would never tell anyone about the mysterious crates left off the manifest at Lloyd’s request. Again Addison would save him. He was sorry—so sorry—for his friend, but what could he do? Surely Addison would not want L&O to fail, would understand that Lloyd himself must not go to prison. Matilda didn’t know, of course, about the crates bound for Gerald de Redvers. She had forgiven Lloyd so much already. He could not expect her to forgive this.
When the Lusitania sank five months after the Josephina, it had been a terrible tragedy, yes, but also, Lloyd could not deny, a help to his own situation. Who was to say the Germans hadn’t also torpedoed the Josephina, perhaps even by mistake in the fog, and not acknowledged it? （Lloyd had suggested this theory to a few reporters, added tempting incentives for those willing to write it up.） The Lusitania had also been rumored to be carrying munitions of some kind. People loved a conspiracy, and they weren’t wrong that the holds of ships were good places to store secrets.
Since the wreck, Lloyd had avoided transporting weapons. There was no need, anyhow. The L&O fleet was being put to work carrying steel, lumber, rubber, wheat, beef, medical supplies, wool, horses, whatever was needed. He’d acquired a few tanker ships, which in turn had led him to develop enough of an interest in the petroleum industry that he’d quietly started up a little subsidiary in Texas, just a modest experimental outpost with a couple of geologists, a few wildcatters, an agent who negotiated leases on patches of wasteland. Liberty Oil, Lloyd was calling the venture.
The Maria Fortuna had gone to work as a troopship for the Canadian Expeditionary Force after he’d offered the British government an exceptionally generous rate. （Not pure altruism, as he retained control of the cargo holds.） Her tidy paint job disappeared under a chaos of razzle-dazzle: wild stripes and checkers and false bow waves designed to confuse range finders. Quite possibly at some point the United States would enter the war, and when it did, more ships would be needed. Lloyd would be ready.
Some of his vessels would be lost, but he had become less afraid of loss, inoculated against it. The dark spirit had left him, or perhaps he’d absorbed it into himself without noticing. Sadness still weighed on him, but his heart beat on; his lungs swelled and contracted. His collar was impeccably white; he walked at a clip. He had no time for mistresses, for soft afternoons playing at love. He required all his dignity. （Despite his best intentions, this bout of fidelity would last the duration of the war but no longer.） What appetite he had for variety, he channeled into business. He would be a titan. He was in the midst of a beginning. The sleeping baby, feeling his first night breeze, was the son of a new Lloyd Feiffer.
Near Missoula, Montana
May 1923
Eight years and five months after the sinking of the Josephina Marian and Jamie Graves walked along a track above a creek, Marian in front, Jamie behind, tall for their age, nearly identical except for the girl’s braid. Blond, skinny children flickering through the trees, through slants of sunlight thick with dust and pollen. Both wore flannel shirts and bib overalls tucked into rubber boots bought for them by Berit, their uncle’s Norwegian housekeeper. The boots made a particular flapping sound against their shins. Gup gup gup.