“This boat is half empty,” added someone else, a matron wrapped in sable like Madeleine. Her voice shook, but Madeleine thought it might be from anger, not cold. “We abandoned ship with seats to spare. We left behind our husbands and sons because you told us we had to, and now they’re out there dying.”
The quartermaster stroked his moustache. “I don’t think it’s—”
“They’re dying,” Madeleine shouted, enraged. She stood up, holding her coat closed over her chest, her fingers bent into claws. “And we have the room! Listen to them! Listen! We have to go back!”
The quartermaster turned, looked back at the distant chaos, the frantic splashing.
“Sir!” protested the same oarsman. “Sir, think on it! It’s madness! They’ll swamp us for certain!”
A murmur of assent rose from a pair of women near the front, but the quartermaster spoke over them.
“Not if we’re vigilant. We’ll circle along the edges to start.” He jammed the pipe into his front pocket. “Right, then. We’re coming about.”
The oarsman dropped his oar. “I’m not doing it.”
“Are you refusing a direct order, seaman?”
“Not refusing, sir. I injured my shoulder just now.” The man crossed his arms, sullen.
“Well, ain’t you just a bloody princess?” sneered one of the men they’d rescued from the aft ropes, the one who hadn’t fallen into the water. “Shove off, then, mate. I’ll row.”
*
But in the end, it took all of them rowing, Madeleine and Eleanor and any of the other women who could, to stroke back to the flotsam of human souls and debris, to begin the dreadful task of trying to salvage the dying from the glossy black sea.
CHAPTER 26
We pulled eight men from the water that night. Two of them were drunk. Two of them died, one right at my feet. All of them seemed delirious, almost—I can’t think of a better word for it. Crazed, perhaps. Even after we’d gotten them aboard, covered them with rugs, they moaned and raved. I believe some of them didn’t even realize they were no longer in the water.
All of them were wearing lifebelts, which seemed a godsend at the time.
It was, I guess. For them.
But for all those other souls, those fifteen-hundred or so still thrashing for their lives . . . they, too, were wearing the cork-and-canvas vests that would not save them, nor let them drown. And so that is how they died. Frozen in place.
I looked and looked for him. I looked in the darkness of night; I looked in the dawn. I searched every face I found, first the living, subsequently the dead. Like the ocean and stars, sometimes I still see them floating, one after another, behind my closed lids.
I told myself that he had made it into another boat, that he had to be on another boat.
I never stopped looking.
Monday, April 15th
Adrift
Lifeboat Four was leaking. No one could pinpoint the source of it, but it was. Ice-cold water sloshed along its bottom, leisurely rising no matter how much any of them bailed.
The silence of the night expanded, infinite but for their own hushed voices and the gentle lapping of water against wood. After she and four other women had tugged and pulled the last man aboard, Madeleine realized she no longer heard the ghastly dying-beast sound; in the last twenty minutes or so, she’d noticed it thinning, flattening into a dull monotone. But she’d not noticed until just this moment that it was utterly done.
No one else cried out for help. Nor would they, ever again.
The terrible peace of it rang in her head. They searched a while longer anyway, rowing this way and that, but there was no one alive to save.
A baby whimpered, and the man at Madeleine’s feet groaned. He was too weak to sit up on his own, and there wasn’t enough space to lie him along the benches, so they’d propped him up against the side as best they could. He seemed insensible, his legs sprawled, pressing against her. The violent shivers that wracked him shook her as well, no matter how she tried to shift away. Every now and then, she’d bend down to chafe her palms against his face and neck. She wasn’t sure why beyond a vague notion to let him know that even in his delirium, he wasn’t alone.
“He knew,” said a woman to Madeleine’s left, low and vehement.
“What?” said another. Eleanor.
“Mr. Ismay. He knew about the ice. Marian and I ran into him yesterday on the promenade. We’d gone out to look at the sunset, and he walked up. He’d gotten a Marconigram about it from another ship. He showed it to us. He told us we were among the icebergs.”