For the four days it took us to get back to New York, people bedded down wherever they could, on tables, on benches, on the floors of the lounges and saloons. Whenever awake, they formed huddles of misery, sobbing and whispering and repeatedly exchanging their tales of that night.
I’ve mulled for many an hour on that, the compulsion to discuss what had happened again and again. I think now I’ve teased it out. If one breaks the horror apart, breaks it into all these little, smaller moments, perhaps it’s possible to reconstruct it in such a way as to make everything more . . . manageable.
At any rate, it’s a better way to carry on than turning to laudanum.
As we sailed for home, the universe beyond Carpathia clamored for the names of Titanic’s survivors aboard the ship, and to the best of the abilities of Carpathia’s unhappy, exhausted wireless operator, the universe had slowly been fed them. （My own, I was told, was among the first released, and at least I had that slight comfort in the days that followed: my family knew I was safe.）
But, as hungry as we were for news of our missing loved ones, we never received a single name wired back to us.
Tuesday, April 16th, 11:59 p.m.
Aboard Carpathia
Madeleine came awake with a jerk. The cabin blazed with light, stark white that plummeted into black. Someone was shooting off rockets. The ship was sinking.
She scrambled up, panicked, and the light flashed again, this time followed by a deep roll of thunder.
She remained upright, catching her breath, waiting for her heart to calm.
Beside her, curled away on the far side of the mattress, Eleanor still slept. Marian, covered in blankets on the settee, also didn’t stir.
The lightning flickered again, dimmer now. The thunder rumbled. A thin patter of rainfall struck the glass covering the portholes, small and subtle, like mice scampering inside walls.
Madeleine eased out of the bed, trying to shift the mattress as little as possible. As soon as her toes touched the floor, her left foot cramped, sharply painful, and she had to stop and bend at the knee with her foot stretched behind her in a long, flexed arch until the tendon released.
She opened the wardrobe and found her dress and cardigan and shoes. The tailor-made was impossible to manage without help, so she simply tugged the sweater on over her combinations, long and white, and worked her feet into the shoes. The leather seams scraped hard against her skin and stockings, dried rigid from their hours submerged in salt water. Her sable was there, too, so she took it from the hanger, put it on as quietly as possible.
Neither Eleanor nor Marian woke.
She took up a White Star deck blanket that someone had draped over a chair, wrapped it over her head and around her shoulders as the women from steerage did. She made very certain the door made no sound as she closed it behind her.
She did not know the time. There was a wall clock back inside the cabin, but she hadn’t thought to look at it, and they had locked her corsage watch away with the rest of her jewels. But it was dark out, cloudy with no hint of anything but full night beyond the dim lights of the deck. After all her hours confined to the captain’s quarters, it was a relief to be outside again, breathing in the rain.
Lightning flashed in the clouds overhead, purple and silver, revealing massive whorls and billows in swift broken instants.
Beneath the storm, Carpathia steamed smoothly along.
The fur coat hung from her, clumped and ragged, the lower third of it stiffened with crystals of salt. The crystals winked as she walked, minuscule diamonds that melted and dropped away with her every step. She left them behind her like a trail of breadcrumbs, only she didn’t know if or when she’d be retracing her steps.
She found her way onto the main section of the deck. She glanced behind her at the bridge, blue-green lights burning, shadows of men within, then down at the empty deck chairs left unfolded from the day. A few fellows had stretched out along slatted benches beneath an awning portside, their arms pillowing their heads. Despite the falling rain, none of them were awake.
Lights glowed, very weak, past the windows of what she guessed was the dining saloon. She found the entrance, pulled open the door. The smell hit her first: onions and cheese and unwashed humans, more than she could easily count. The illumination was coming from a handful of wall sconces; all the chandeliers had been darkened. She could see why the sconces had been left on: there were so many people spread out across the floor that it would be easy get up in the middle of the night and stumble across a neighbor just trying to get to the lavatory.
She began to pick her way between them. She paused to take in each face, men and women both but certainly every single man, but did not see Jack.