Welcome back, Dear Readers (or should I call you Lowe's Flotilla? Haha!). I appreciate each and every one of you, and I cherish your reviews; whether you are a long-time reader, a guest, or new to the story, your thoughts and your support are SO IMPORTANT to me! THANK YOU once again for your interest in my story; I just can't say it enough!
This chapter may be a little frustrating (you'll see what I mean soon enough), but hang in there, please... :)
Oh, and be sure to check out Rosie's updated Wanderers and Stargazers - The Official Score on Youtube; she's added two new beautiful and haunting songs that really encapsulate the last few desperate moments of Titanic; they give me CHILLS every time I listen!
Clear Cameron had been trying to comfort the weeping Irish girl next to her for nearly an hour, well before the ship had disappeared into the sea. She was inconsolable, first wailing hysterically and then dissolving in a never-ending puddle of tears. Between fresh bursts of sobs, Clear was able to deduce that her best friend had been left behind on the ship. Worse, the man this girl - Katie - had been romancing aboard the ship was the one responsible; he had pushed her away from their boat as she was about to jump in. Poor Katie alternated between devastation and self-hatred at bringing such a curse down upon her friend. Sympathetically, Clear patted the girl's hand. "It's not your fault," she said soothingly. "And I'm sure your friend was able to find another boat."
"You don't know her!" the girl howled. "She's probably running around putting babies into boats rather than taking a seat for herself. She'll die up there without me!"
"Corrine can take care of herself," declared her friend Kate on the other side of her. She, too, had been trying to comfort Katie, to no avail. "You know she'll find a way... because..." she gestured with her head behind her.
She looked up. That officer was staring at them again, his dark eyes unreadable in the black night. But she knew he was listening closely. Between the many tasks he was trying to complete - tying up boats, organizing supplies, reassuring frightened passengers, calling out orders to crewmembers - he had still found time to pay attention to the drama at the other end of his boat.
Katie grabbed Kate's arm with surprising strength. "But the tea leaves," she whispered.
"What?" Clear asked, bewildered.
Kate turned to her, sighing. "Katie believes in reading tea leaves-"
"They always tell the truth!" Katie interrupted.
"-And she read Corrine's one day after afternoon tea on the ship. She didn't tell her, because she'd already left the dining room-"
"But they predicted that Corrine would die soon," Katie finished miserably.
Clear shook her head. "Superstition, is all," she reassured Katie. Kate nodded in agreement.
But Katie refused to be consoled. "She was still on that ship," she whispered. "I know it in my heart. She never found another boat. She'll die in the freezing water, all alone..." It was too much to bear, and she broke down in tears again. Even Kate was beginning to look distressed, as if she too knew that Katie was right.
Then Clear saw the officer shift his position at the tiller.
Something in his demeanor had changed. It was as if he had been waiting for confirmation of something that he now knew. He stood up straighter, and in the glow of his electric torch, she saw steely determination in the set of his jaw.
The pieces fell together in her mind at last. Why, he was in love with the missing girl, she realized with wonder. He cared for nothing and no one but her. And he was not going to let her die out there alone. Somehow, he was going to find a way to save her.
With a sliver of jealousy, she hoped that she would someday find a man that would love her the way this officer loved his girl.
Daisy Minahan disliked the young officer intensely.
Ever since she had boarded his boat, he had been ordering people around. Stay back, he shouted to those on deck. Take that oar, he ordered a crewman. Get off the mast, he growled at a lady. His manners were atrocious, his movements abrupt, his tone offensive.
It was enough to rattle even the stoutest heart, and hers was decidedly not in that category.
Daisy was a child of Irish immigrants, a fact that she desperately tried to hide. As a socialite in Wisconsin, she was a big fish in a small pond, but she was new money, and painfully conscious of her precarious social standing. She hadn't even wanted to return to her ancestral homeland - she didn't want to be reminded at all of where she came from, and she feared what other, more pedigreed people might say if they heard where she was to travel. Only her beloved brother's constant pleadings had convinced her to take the trip with him. Once there, though, she found it entirely displeasing - as she had expected. She faked an illness and insisted on returning to Wisconsin at once. She wanted nothing more to do with her family's humble past; she wanted only to look forward to her future.
Although she gamely (and insincerely) protested that she could last just a little while longer in Ireland, she couldn't have been more thrilled when her brother booked them a first-class cabin on Titanic as a consolation prize for having to cut short their trip. Not only was she coming home early, she was coming home in style. On this trip, she had had a chance to rub elbows with the likes of the Thayers and the Wideners. She basked in the joy of name-dropping, of polite conversation and scandalous gossip. She was in her element - she belonged at last.
That delightful interlude ended abruptly when the ship hit an iceberg.
They were awakened suddenly in the middle of the night by a sharp knock at their door and a demand that they dress and report to the boat deck. A steward fastened a lifebelt over her new velvet cape with the fur trim. The crew rushed them about, telling them to go here or there. It was all so confusing, and disconcerting. She didn't see any of her friends from the dinner party earlier. She wondered if they had already left on the forward lifeboats, which she assumed were reserved for the richest and most famous passengers.
And then she was manhandled into one of the little boats, with her sister-in-law - but without the brother she adored. The officer helping to load the boat - the same one who now dictated their fate - told her curtly that no men were permitted to board, and that was that. No amount of pleading, cajoling, or demanding would make it otherwise. She watched William sadly from her seat as he threw her and his wife a kiss.
The descent was drama-filled, but she hardly cared, so caught up in misery was she at her own predicament. It wasn't until they hit the water and started to row away from the ship that the officer's true colors were revealed.
Oh, he was a sailor all right: crude, nasty, vicious, hardhearted - in short, not a proper gentleman at all. He hailed other boats and tied them to his, ordering the passengers to obey his commands. He barked instructions at the other men, seemingly unaware of the impression he was making on the ladies in earshot. He put up a mast, for goodness sake - whatever did he think he was going to do with that? - and told the men to give him their matches. Why, he acted for all the world like he was the lord of the sea! He seemed to be everywhere at once, which annoyed Daisy, as she just wanted him to sit down quietly and act civilized.
And then, his ridiculous idea to return to the scene of the sinking...! Why, they would all be swamped, dumped into the icy water themselves, and left to die! Several women, including Daisy, strongly and loudly protested the idea, and he growled at them to "shut up." His rudeness shocked her into silence, whereupon he sat for a moment, thinking. A short time later, he announced that he would rearrange the occupants of his 'flotilla', as he called it, into four boats, and take the fifth back with a handpicked crew to pick up those unfortunates in the water.
She supposed it was noble enough - after all, he would only be risking himself and his crew, not the ladies - but leaping from boat to boat in the middle of the night, in the Atlantic ocean? It sounded insane - and terrifying.
But no one had the nerve to argue with him. After the ship disappeared and the screaming started, he seemed frantic, nearly out of control. His wild eyes flicked back and forth constantly from the water, to the boats filled with weeping women and children.
"We have to go back! Make some room!" he demanded in that atrocious accent of his. Reluctantly, the passengers obeyed. Soon it was her turn. But she hesitated. What if her foot slipped? She might end up in the water, too! Oh, it was definitely safer to stay in the boat she was already in. She was sure she could convince the crew...
"Jump, God damn you, jump!" the officer roared at her, his voice full of frustration laced with panic.
She looked at him in disbelief, eyes narrowing in hatred. If there was one thing Daisy despised, it was strong language. It spoke of ill-breeding, humble origins, working class men... in short, everything she had disdained all her life. How dare he speak to her like that?!
As she jumped, she thought about how there would definitely be a reckoning for this terrible man once they reached New York.
In just a few seconds, Daniel Buckley was going to be in a world of trouble.
He had followed that plucky Irish lass up the forbidden steps to the second class promenade, then climbed the crew ladder, bringing up the rear of their small party. Once on the boat deck, though, he had lost track of the leader - Corrine - and had followed the other girls to the port side. Their party was quickly separated in the mayhem of loading and launching the boats there - the Finnish girls took the boat furthest to the stern, while the Irish girls got in the one with the loud officer, Lowe. Just before they hopped on, though, one of them threw her shawl over his head. "They're not letting men in," she whispered, "but you're somebody's son." So he was bundled into the boat along with the women.
He had kept his head down most of the night. Now, though, the officer had decided to play musical chairs with the passengers in the five lifeboats he had tied up. And he would soon discover that one of his 'women' was just a scared Irish lad.
Sure enough, when it was his turn to jump into another boat, the shawl slipped from his head. He turned around to the officer's furious eyes. Without preamble, the man picked Daniel up by the collar and the seat of his pants and threw him into the nearest boat, the one in which the two Irish girls now sat.
Daniel knew he was lucky the officer didn't toss him overboard; he surely didn't approve of his ruse, but he was preoccupied with moving other passengers. He barely spared Daniel a glance, other to admonish him sternly: "You'd better make the most of the life I'm letting you keep."
Daniel decided that he would, at that. He turned toward the kind girl who had offered him her shawl. She was quieter and more plain than her flamboyant friend, but he decided he liked that better. He gently touched her arm. "Thank you, miss," he said softly. "I'd be struggling for my life out there like the rest if it wasn't for you."
She smiled timidly at him. He decided he liked that smile, too - quite a lot, actually. "I'm Danny," he said, offering her his hand.
"Nice to make your acquaintance, Danny. My name is Kate."
Fang Lang bobbed on a half-submerged door and waited to die.
He was sure it wouldn't be long now. He had managed to lash himself to the door right before the ship sank. He knew that as a foreigner, and a third-class traveler - a man, at that - he stood no chance of finding a place in a lifeboat. But he was a sailor, on his way to America to join a shipping company there, and resourceful; he had enough experience with the sea to realize that the only way to survive in this frigid water would be to create a sort of makeshift raft for himself, and that was what he had done. But the icy water defied his futile efforts, and now, despite surviving far longer than most, he knew he was not going to live much longer - maybe a few more minutes, fifteen at most. There was just too much of his body in contact with the sea, and it was slowly leaching away his heat, energy... and will to live. He sighed and lay back on the door, waiting for the inevitable, and hoping that it would be relatively painless at the end.
But now - what was that noise?
It had been utterly silent out in this wasteland since the screaming stopped. Bodies bobbed everywhere around him, bumping into the door, but they were all dead. There was nothing left moving out here... nothing but him - and this new sound. It was... a man, shouting.
"-alive out there?" he heard, as if from a long distance away.
Then came the sound of oars splashing the water. He thought at first it was his imagination. There were no boats here; this was the dead zone, and the living had abandoned it. No one was going to come back for him; no one would save him. And yet...
"Is there anyone alive out there?"
It came again, that call, and then a beam as bright as a lighthouse lamp swept over him. Fang tried to sit up, but the movement unbalanced the door, so he lay back down and began waving his arms furiously, shouting as loudly as he could in a voice made hoarse with cold.
Turning his head, he saw the men in the boat catch sight of him and begin slowly maneuvering his way. It seemed to take forever, and Fang wondered if they would make it before he expired, but soon the boat was gently jostling the side of his small raft.
A member of the boat's crew shined his light in Fang's face, then groaned. "It's a Jap!" he said in disgust.
"I don't care," another growled, and Fang raised his head enough to see that it was a ship's officer. "Pull him in. We will save everyone we can."
Someone cut the lashings holding Fang to the door. Rough hands seized him, and he was dropped unceremoniously into the bottom of the boat. A sailor laid a blanket over his shoulders, and for a time, he shivered miserably. Then, seized by a sudden urge to move, to prove himself, he sat up and pushed aside one of the crew, who grunted but made way for him. Grabbing an oar, he rowed with the others, earning a nod of approval and thanks from the officer.
His seat was near the officer, who was at the tiller. He stood with one hand cupped over his mouth and the other holding the electric torch that he trained over the frozen bodies bobbing in the waves from the boat's movement. "Is there anyone alive out there?" the officer continued to call, over and over.
He turned back to his crew, who were watching carefully for movement in the still mass. "Holler if you see a woman - any at all," he told them firmly. "Alive... or dead." His voice cracked on the last word.
Sitting beside him at the oar, Fang heard him whisper, almost too quietly to hear: "Where are you?"
I really enjoyed writing this chapter, and showing Harry's state of mind and actions from a third-person perspective.
All four POV characters here were real passengers on the Titanic. Clear Cameron was a second-class passenger in RealLowe's boat who wrote some glowing things about him in private correspondence after the tragedy. Daniel Buckley is famously known for wearing a shawl to disguise himself as a woman; however, although there is some discrepancy about which lifeboat he boarded, most historians think it was 13, not 14. But he's one of my favorite real-life Titanic passengers (along with Olaus Abelseth, Rene Harris, Jack Thayer, and yes, Bruce Ismay), and for that, as well as story-related reasons, I have him in Harry's boat. Fang Lang was one of the few passengers RealLowe plucked from the sea that night; he was Chinese, not Japanese, but the prejudices of the time likely wouldn't have allowed for that distinction. It was also important for me to add that Harry picked him up not caring what his nationality was; given that he was later accused of racism at the hearings (which won't appear in this story; author's discretion), I wanted to emphasize what Inger Sheil had mentioned in her biography: that unlike most of his peers, he had a high regard for Chinese sailors.
My favorite POV character to write was Daisy Minahan, which is why her section is the longest. I really liked showing a different interpretation of Harry, one that wasn't as glowing and laudatory. His behavior that night, while competent and decisive, could very easily be interpreted as rude and even intimidating to the delicate sensibilities of first-class ladies (luckily, there weren't all that many in his boat). A lot of details about her personality are conjecture... but it was informed conjecture, based on her background, her social status, and her subsequent statements regarding RealLowe.
