“Thank you,” she murmured.
At the platform’s edge, she waited for her signal, but nothing happened. The bow stayed where it was, the immense upturned nose of a proud and haughty thing. The men were talking urgently among themselves. The naval architect went rushing off. She waited. The bottle grew heavier. Her fingers ached. Down in the crowd, two men were shoving each other, causing a commotion. As she watched, one struck the other in the face.
“Tildy, for God’s sake!” Lloyd was tugging at her arm. The bow was sliding away. So quickly. She had not expected something so large would go so quickly.
She leaned out and hurled the bottle after the retreating wall of steel. Awkwardly, overhand. It thudded against the hull but did not break, only bounced off and dropped to the slipway, shattering on the concrete in a splat of glass and amber liquid. The Josephina receded. The river rose up behind the stern in a green bulge, collapsed into foam.
North Atlantic
January 1914
Four years and nine months later
Josephina Eterna, eastbound in the night. A jeweled brooch on black satin. A solitary crystal on the wall of a dark cave. A stately comet in an empty sky.
Below her lights and honeycombed cabins, below the men toiling in red heat and black dust, below her barnacled keel, a school of cod passed, a dense pack of flexing bodies in the darkness, eyes bulging wide though there was nothing to see. Below the fish: cold and pressure, empty black miles, a few strange, luminescent creatures drifting after flecks of food. Then the sandy bottom, blank except for faint trails left by hardy shrimp, blind worms, creatures who would never know such a thing as light existed.
The night Addison Graves came to dinner and found Annabel seated beside him was the second out of New York. He had descended without enthusiasm from the masculine quiet of the bridge into the dining room’s trilling, sparkling cacophony. The air felt hot and moist, smelled of food and perfume. The ocean cold clinging to his wool uniform evaporated; immediately he prickled with sweat. At his table, he stooped in a bow, cap under his arm. The passengers’ faces radiated a predatory eagerness for his attention. “Good evening,” he said as he sat, shaking out his napkin. He rarely gleaned pleasure from conversation, certainly not from the self-congratulatory chitchat demanded by passengers wealthy or important enough to wrangle seats at the captain’s table. At first he registered nothing beyond the pale green of Annabel’s dress. On his other side sat an older woman in brown. The first of a long series of fussy dishes arrived, borne from the kitchen by tailcoated waiters.
Lloyd Feiffer had promoted Addison to captain as soon as he’d inherited L&O, when the turned earth was still fresh on his father’s grave. Over a steak dinner at Delmonico’s, Lloyd had given him charge of a ship, and Addison had only nodded, not wanting to betray his elation. Captain Graves! The miserable boy he’d been long ago on that farm in Illinois would finally be gone forever, ground to nothing under the heel of his polished boot, tossed overboard.
But Lloyd had raised one small concern. “You’ll have to be genial, Graves. You’ll have to converse. It’s part of what they pay for. Don’t look like that. It won’t be so bad.” He paused, looking anxious. “Do you think you can manage?”
“Yes,” Addison had said, his ambition outweighing the dread in his heart. “Of course.”
Waiters swirled around delivering bowls of consommé. On Addison’s right, Mrs. Somebody-or-Other in the brown dress was relating her sons’ life histories in great detail and with such slow and deliberate enunciation that she might have been reading out the terms of a treaty. Lamb with mint jelly appeared and was eaten. Then roast chicken. Over the salad, during a brief intermission in his neighbor’s recitation, Addison turned, finally, to the woman in the pale green dress. Annabel, she’d said her name was. She appeared quite young. He asked if it would be her first time in Britain.
“No,” she said. “I’ve been several times.”
“Then you enjoy it?”
At first she did not reply. Then, when she spoke, her tone was matter-of-fact. “Not particularly, but my father and I decided it would be best if I left New York for a while.”
A curious admission. He studied her more closely. Her head was lowered; she seemed intent on her meal. She was older than he had initially thought, in her late twenties, and extremely fair, though the careless application of her rouge and lipstick gave her a blurred, feverish appearance. She had cream-colored hair like the mane of a palomino horse and eyelashes and eyebrows so pale as to be almost invisible. Abruptly, she looked up and met his gaze.