A Duty to the Dead Read online

  “Are we sinking? Is this a precaution or real?”

  “Damned real,” he said tightly, and was gone.

  There was a nurse just up ahead with bruises on her face. Someone had tied an impromptu bandage around her head, and already the blood was seeping through. Serviettes from the dining room? They gave the woman a rakish air, and I wanted to laugh.

  No, that’s hysteria. Stop it, I warned myself.

  The Irish nurse had come up beside me, trying to edge her way up the queue. Her face was so pale the freckles across her nose stood out. “I don’t like the water,” she was saying, “I’d rather take my chances here—”

  I put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t be silly, Eileen. If anything happens, the lifeboats are the safest place for us to be.”

  Eileen froze, fear stark in her eyes. “Then it’s true, we’re sinking—”

  I could hear shouting now, and saw that Harry Dyke, one of the officers, was looking up at the poop deck, where firemen from below were trying to launch a lifeboat for themselves.

  “You fools!” he yelled. “Stay onboard—we’re trying to beach her—”

  But they were frantic to be gone, and without waiting for orders or other passengers to join them, they launched anyway.

  “Stay away from the ship,” Dyke was shouting to them now. “And for God’s sake, try to pick up any of the crew who’ve already jumped!”

  Surprised, I turned to look at the sea and could see bobbing heads treading water, those who hadn’t waited for a boat to be lowered. From the look of them, they were already tiring. The water was November cold, after all, in spite of the sun’s warmth.

  Eileen fled before I could stop her.

  The firemen were paying no heed, but I thought they’d heard Dyke. I saw one reach out an arm to drag a swimmer inboard.

  Then the third officer, Lawes, was trying to prevent two of his boats from automatically launching. So far the Abandon Ship signal still hadn’t been given. We were all at our stations, worried and waiting for instructions. None came. I eyed the distance to Kea. Could we make it that far, wounded as we were? Or was the submarine lurking nearby, watching, ready to try another shot if it looked as if we’d be successful? I shivered at the thought.

  I saw that Lawes was too late—the boats dropped to the water with such violence that spray swept the side of the ship. By a mercy, both stayed upright. To my surprise, Eileen was in one of them.

  Britannic was listing now, it wasn’t just my imagination, and it was harder to understand why the Captain hadn’t ordered the boats away. I could appreciate how the passengers on Britannic’s sister ship, Titanic, must have felt in the cold darkness of the North Atlantic. At least here there was daylight—

  Someone behind me was pushing hard, eager to be nearer the lifeboat, as if afraid she’d be left behind. She jostled my right arm, and I felt faint from the stab of pain.

  I stepped back, letting her have my place, then sat down on the deck, lowering my head, swallowing hard. Nausea was there, all too close to the surface, dizzying in its intensity. I hadn’t realized that a break in a bone could be so exquisitely painful. I’d feel a greater tolerance for the wounded after this.

  One of the other nurses came to bend over me, and then we heard people shouting and screaming a warning. I managed to get to my feet and turn to look over the railing.

  The two boats from Lawes’s station were in trouble, and Bartlett was bellowing to them through the loud-hailer. “Mind the screws, damn it!”

  I stood there, unable to turn away, as one of the lifeboats caught in Britannic’s wake was being dragged inexorably back toward our three propellers, already partly out of the water, their great brass wings shining wet in the sun as they went round.

  Like everyone else along that rail, I cried out in horror, staring down at the frightened, helpless faces turned first up to us and then back toward the stern. There was nothing that anyone could do. No way to stop what was about to happen. In what seemed to be slow motion, but must have been only a matter of seconds, the first boat was swept into the screws. The sound of wood rending reached us. Screams echoed across the water, and then there was silence.

  I don’t think anyone on the ship moved.

  Wood debris and torn bodies churned into the bloody wake.

  I felt sick. In five sailings with severely wounded onboard, I had never seen anything quite so terrible. The image stayed with me, repeating itself over and over again.

  Dr. Paterson, swearing like a trooper, raced toward the stern, looking over into the water for survivors.

  The Abandon Ship alarm was sounding now, and I realized that while we’d been absorbed by the drama on the water, Britannic’s list had increased alarmingly. Someone came up to me, cursing me, telling me to get into one of the lifeboats before it was too late to lower them.

  It was Lieutenant Browning, harried and angry, his expression a mask of duty but his mind already leaping ahead to what we were about to face.

  It was the last thing I wanted to do now—leave this ship. I could see other boats in danger of the same fate as the first one. It would be better to drown than to face those churning blades. But when I turned, drawn to stare at them, I was surprised to see that the screws were barely moving, that someone had ordered all engines stopped. It was then I knew with cold certainty that we were sinking.

  Collecting my wits, I said, “Look—the boat I’m assigned to is full—”

  Browning shook me, and I cried out from the pain in my arm.

  He stopped, saw how bloody my scarf was, and ripped my apron off below my vest, using it to fashion a makeshift sling.

  “This way, Sister!” He took my good hand and led me through the ship to another boat station, lifting me bodily into the first one we came to just as it was ready to lower. “This one has a better chance of making it.”

  What he didn’t add was that with the ship listing it would be touch and go on the other side.

  The occupants reached up to pull me safely aboard.

  “Be safe—Godspeed!” he told me, and then he was gone.

  We hit the sea heavily, bobbed dangerously, then steadied. Someone was calling frantically to us from the water, and I turned to see that it was the Irish nurse, clinging to a shard of wood from one of the broken boats.

  I leaned forward to touch the shoulder of the officer in charge of our boat and pointed. Looking around, he saw Eileen.

  Nodding, he tried to steer the boat nearer to her. She was having a dreadful time staying afloat as the plank perversely danced away on the next swell. Afraid of losing her, several of us leaned over at once to try to reach out for the bit of wood she gripped so frantically, and nearly capsized ourselves in the process. The officer shouted a warning, and then I saw the boat hook lying in the bottom. I picked it up, swung it over everyone’s head, and out toward Eileen. She hesitated, reluctant to let go of the only security she knew, and then in a final desperate lunge that took all her strength, she grasped the curved end of the hook. I could see the despair in her eyes as she held on for dear life. With Barbara Mercer’s help, I dragged her to the side of our boat.

  Because I was nearest her, I passed the boat hook to someone else and put out my left hand to catch Eileen’s. Barbara did the same, and with an effort I hadn’t dreamed I was capable of, we began to haul the girl up over the side. Eileen was crying, begging us not to let her go. Nurses on either side of us caught at her wet clothing as it tried to pull her down, and we soon had her safely aboard.

  Other hands lowered her gently into the well. It was then I saw the lacerations on her legs, and the tatters of skirt and petticoat that only half covered them.

  The wounds were deep and bleeding profusely. It must have been a torment for her almost beyond bearing. But the coldness of the water had helped stanch the rate of bleeding long enough for her to be rescued.

  Barbara and Margaret began to bind up the wounds, but the pain was intolerable now. Eileen fainted.

  “Just
as well,” Barbara muttered as she worked.

  Our boat crew began to row now with vigorous strokes, pulling us as far from Britannic as possible, their backs arched over the oars and the muscles in their shoulders straining with the effort.

  There was nothing more I could do. I sat back, nursing my arm. I’d damaged it picking up the boat hook with both hands, trying to reach Eileen and pull her to us. The ends of the bone felt as if they were grinding together now. But what else could I have done? In the closely packed lifeboat, there had been no time or space to shift places. I tried to touch the area around the break, but it hurt so much I stopped. It was too late to worry now.

  Besides, the little lifeboat was rolling in a fashion that Britannic never had done, even in storms. I was feeling increasingly uneasy. Or was it the agony in my arm? It was overwhelming, and seemed to have reached a crescendo. I closed my eyes, trying my best to cope.

  Think of anything but your arm, I commanded myself. Anything—

  England? No, don’t think of home. Something else…

  My great-grandmother had danced at a ball in Belgium on the eve of Waterloo, while Napoleon was racing north across the French border. She had watched my great-grandfather slip from the ballroom to ride to meet his regiment, then smiled to hide her fear from the others present, and turned to dance with a new partner. Later she’d had her portrait painted in the ball gown she wore that night. I tried to picture her floating across the polished floor in the arms of another man while the one she loved was facing the greatest battle of his career. Would I be painted in my torn, bloodstained uniform, after surviving Britannic? My mother would have a fit—

  There was a single blast of the ship’s whistle, and I opened my eyes in time to see that her bridge was almost on a level with the water. Britannic was going. That beautiful ship—

  Tears began to run down my face, salty on my lips. I shook my head to clear it, and unable to turn away, watched the great liner die. On all sides of me other people were crying as well, their eyes fixed on the ship, not ready to absorb what this meant—or what lay ahead of us.

  We could hear the boilers exploding as the cold water reached them and the splash of gear and equipment sliding down the decks to crash into the sea. The ship itself was creaking, as if she were alive, protesting.

  The engineers, last to leave, were madly scrambling out of funnel four, after holding their positions until the end.

  Lucy, across the boat, exclaimed, “Oh, my God. Just like Titanic.”

  Barbara, beside me, said dryly, “No, dear, Lusitania. There aren’t any icebergs in the Mediterranean.”

  “Was it a mine?” someone else asked.

  I was shading my eyes against the sun’s glare as one of the officers assigned to our boat cleared his throat and answered the question.

  “Must have been. None of the lookouts saw any sign of a U-boat or reported a torpedo’s wake. But if it was a submarine, thank God it didn’t attack again.”

  “Bloody U-boat wouldn’t have picked us up, even so.” It was the rating at the helm.

  We had moved smartly in a dash to put ourselves beyond reach of the great ship’s death throes, afraid of being pulled under with her, but she filled our world still.

  Then someone said, “There’s the end of her!” in a hollow voice, as if they couldn’t believe their eyes.

  Britannic seemed to roll uncertainly, then bow first she raced down through the water, as if she had a rendezvous below and was late. The roar of her passing was like something human, a cry like nothing I’d ever heard. The sight and sound were heart wrenching, and as I looked out at the turbulence where the great ocean liner had once been, I knew I’d remember those last appalling moments until the day I died.

  The sea seemed lonely now. Wide and endless and unfriendly. We were in the middle of nowhere. Kea was off on the horizon, and this was a busy sea lane, but the water was so desperately empty. Even crippled, Britannic had been comforting, a place we knew, large and able to hold its own against the vastness of the sea. Or so we’d wanted to believe.

  “Did everyone get off?” Lucy asked anxiously. “Oh, my God, what if we’d had more than three thousand wounded onboard?” She began to tremble.

  We were all shaken, uncertain, trying not to think about that. We’d had enough lifeboats, and we knew the procedures by heart, but it was a daunting prospect in the face of our present situation.

  Attempting to shift the subject, I said, “Did anyone respond to the Captain’s distress call?”

  “There was no mention of other boats in the area, as far as I know,” Margaret replied. “They must have learned about the mine laying….”

  In the bottom of the boat, Eileen moaned a little, and Barbara asked, “Is there a medical kit onboard? She needs something now for the pain.”

  There was a swift scramble to find the kit, and I let myself go for a few minutes, drifting on a tide of sickness and pain. Even so I could hear Barbara talking as she worked on Eileen’s limbs, worried that the girl would bleed to death.

  I tried to recapture the image of that ballroom in Belgium, and my great-grandmother whirling past long candlelit windows in a daring waltz, smiling up at a young lieutenant while out of the corner of her eye, she watched another officer slipping out the door and hurrying away. But behind my lids now was only the red glare of the sun.

  As I opened my eyes again, other lifeboats had drawn within hailing distance of ours. One of them called to us and asked if everyone was all right. I thought it was Lieutenant Browning—prayed it was.

  The officer in our boat bellowed, “We’ll do.”

  Someone else called across the water, “How many boats did we lose?”

  “Four.” The number seemed to hang in the air like signal flags on a lanyard.

  “Try to stay together, then. We’ve a better chance.”

  I was nearly sure it was Captain Bartlett speaking now, but water tended to distort voices. Would he be blamed for what happened, like the captain of Titanic? You couldn’t see a mine in time, could you? They were purposely low in the water, bobbing, hiding in the froth, a cruel and unseen killer.

  We roused ourselves and began taking stock. Three others in our boat were wounded, in addition to Eileen. The only doctor among us had sustained a blow to the head, the knob rising like a small hill, and he was slow to respond to questions about how he felt. Two of the nurses had rather serious cuts. Barbara was already ripping apart her skirts for makeshift bandaging, and others followed suit.

  “Salt air is a healer,” Lucy was saying, trying for cheer. “But I doubt it was meant this way, medically.”

  Barbara said succinctly, “Bloody Germans!”

  I said, noticing that somewhere I had lost my cap and the heat was beating down, “We need to shield our heads and faces from the sun. Try to rig something if you can. We’ll burn in no time.”

  My apron was around my arm, but I borrowed a pocketknife from the man at the helm, and with a little help managed to hack a strip from my skirt that I could wind, turbanlike, around my head.

  “You look like an Arab,” one of the other women told me, and there was a general nervous laugh. But I noted that others were following my example. I managed to cut another strip and handed it to Barbara to shield Eileen’s face from the sun, rigging it over the bucket used for bailing. The glare from the water was very different, this close to it, and I found I was squinting horribly until I’d created my own shade.

  We fell silent for a time, overwhelmed by events. There seemed to be no one else in the world but ourselves, a cluster of small boats at the mercy of the sea.

  Thank God it was not raining or stormy.

  I felt myself drifting away again on the thought, the wash of the sea against the sides of the boat and the warmth of the sun surprisingly soothing for a little while. My great-grandmother seemed to have abandoned me, leaving me to my own devices, and for a time I tried to pretend we were on the ship that had brought us back from India, lying on deck
with our backs to the mast, watching moonlight streaming across the dark sea. It had been too hot to sleep below, and the passengers had come up to find a breath of air, counting stars until that palled.

  POSH…I hadn’t thought of that in ages. It stood for Port side Out, Starboard side Home. The best cabins, the cooler ones, were on the port side of a vessel traveling out to India, and on the starboard side coming home. And still there were nights when not a breath of air stirred, and if the ship hadn’t been moving, we’d all have surely died of heat exhaustion.

  The image of a dark ship on a dark sea faded, abandoning me too. I came back to the present, unable to escape for very long.

  My arm had settled into a dull, constant ache as long as I kept it close to my body and braced. I think all of us were feeling the exhaustion of the last hours. God knew, after what we’d been through, it wasn’t surprising.

  Then suddenly I was awake again, overheated in the full strength of the sun, and thirsty. I wanted to dip my hands in the cool water surrounding us and bathe my face. But I knew better. Not only would it dry my skin more, but it would also make it burn and blister.

  People were sleeping for a few minutes at a time as I’d done, or staring out to sea without actually seeing it. No one seemed inclined to talk now. I wondered what memories they were chasing, and if theirs had succeeded better than mine. I turned my head to look forward, at the officer. He was anxiously scanning the horizon. The ratings were trying to keep us on course with the other boats, but I didn’t think we were making much progress toward Kea. I looked around and found that several of the boats had even drifted away. The rhythmic slap of the waves against the sides of ours was the only sound.

  Surely Kea was farther away than before? It had looked closer from the decks of Britannic. Hadn’t it? I couldn’t be sure.

  Where I was sitting, my back had very little support, and soon it began to ache in concert with my arm, in spite of my sling. I straightened, trying to ease both. Why had the mast on the ship from India seemed comfortable, and here there was no comfort to be had?