The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan Read Free Book Online

behind me!”
    Hannah gave Isabelle a stern look and said, “She’s completely mistaken. No one was hit in the head,” then launched into a fabricated story about seeing a nearly empty lifeboat rescuing people from the water. Mrs. Grant insisted that she had seen it too and wouldn’t let anyone say a thing to the contrary. She abruptly changed the subject to report that Mr. and Mrs. Worthington Smith were last seen sitting in deck chairs and smoking cigarettes: “He said, ‘Save the women and children first,’ and she replied, ‘I’ve never gone off in a boat without Worthy, and I’m certainly not about to start now.’” Later I heard a similar story about a couple from the Titanic, and I wondered if this had really happened or if Mrs. Grant had merely appropriated the story to distract Mrs. Fleming from her woes.
    “That’s true love,” said Mary Ann dreamily. It made the death and horror of the wreck seem romantic and purposeful. Henry, after all, had done something similar for me, if without the noble words or the cigarette. I tried to forget the look of panic on his face as he hustled me into Mr. Hardie’s arms and implored him to put me on the boat. I wanted to kiss Henry’s cheek and make him promise to follow me, but he was intent on whatever he was saying to Mr. Hardie, some last instruction that I was too terrified to absorb, so I didn’t say good-bye to him. I preferred to envision him waving at me from a deck chair rather than floundering around in the cold black water and grasping at sticks from the wreckage. But most of all, I liked to picture him dressed in the suit he had worn at our wedding and waiting for me when I got to New York. Henry could always get a table in a crowded restaurant or tickets to the opera. It’s ironic to think that he worked the same sort of magic when he booked our passage on the Empress Alexandra. With war on the horizon, many people were eager to return to America, and first-class tickets were scarce; but when I asked Henry how he did it, he simply said, “It’s a little miracle. The same sort of miracle that brought you to me just when I thought I was going to have to marry Felicity Close.”
    Now Mr. Hardie said, “There were more than enough lifeboats for everyone, twenty boats built for forty persons each,” but even with our untrained eyes we could see that the boats had not been designed for forty. Still, it was a useful fiction, enabling me to convince myself that Henry had survived, in spite of the fact that I had seen the chaos of the Empress Alexandra ’s last minutes with my own eyes. Afterwards, we learned that most of the lifeboats on the starboard side of the ship had burned in the fire and that others had pushed away from the burning wreck half-full.
    At four o’clock, we ate our crust of bread and cheese. Colonel Marsh possessed a large pocket watch and Mr. Hardie charged him with keeping track of the hour. Every so often he would call out, “Time, sir!” and the Colonel would pull his watch out of his pocket and announce the hour. He looked very important as he did it, but also as if he were modestly trying to downplay what he saw as a crucial role in the workings of the boat. Earlier, Mr. Hardie had said something about using the watch to gauge our longitude, and they had had a long discussion about how that might be done. Perhaps it was that interchange that gave the Colonel confidence to ask, “Don’t you think you could give us a little more to eat and drink than this? It seems that we have an awful lot, seeing as those ships in the trading route are bound to show up any minute,” and indeed, the biscuit tins and water casks were taking up their share of room in the back of the boat. But Mr. Hardie would not change his plan for rationing the food and water they contained. At first we laughed about it. “Hardie’s a tough master,” we said almost fondly. Though we hardly knew one another, a sense of ourselves in the lifeboat was