The Lifeboat by Charlotte Rogan Read Free Book Online Page A

beginning to form, with Hardie at the center the way a grain of rough sand lies at the very center of a pearl.
    The high clouds turned pink and gold, like a painted ceiling that was pierced at intervals by bands of silver light. “Look!” called Mrs. Hewitt, who had been a hotel proprietress; and everyone became silent, for one of the sunbeams had sought out our boat and we floated, awestruck and illuminated, until Mary Ann raised up her voice with the strain of “O God, Our Help in Ages Past.” Predictably, a French maid named Lisette began to cry, and not until the final note did the heavens shift and the lifeboat move into the shadow of a cloud.
    There was much talk of what the meaning of that natural or supernatural occurrence had been. The deacon said, “I think we can draw a parallel between the ray of light and the fact that we have all been chosen to be rescued in this boat.”
    “We’re hardly rescued yet,” said Hannah. I started to say, “God helps those who help themselves,” but I stopped after the first three words when I saw Mrs. Grant looking at me in an appraising and maybe calculating way. This time she had refrained from singing and seemed to retreat inside herself, aloof from the general feeling of camaraderie conferred upon us by the glorious evening and our sense of gratitude that so far we had been spared. Even after Mr. Hardie made a detailed inventory of supplies and amended his estimate of how long our food and water would last—three to four days, he said now—we did not despair, for it was plenty long enough.

Night
     
    THERE WERE MORE songs as night fell. Hannah, who seemed to have made fast friends with Mrs. Grant or perhaps had known her from before, was gazing at me in an odd way, and I reflexively put my hand to my hair and started to worry about how I looked. Hannah had gray eyes and long hair that twisted into thick locks when it blew in the wind. She had put a filmy piece of cloth around her shoulders, and it flapped lightly in the breeze the way the wings of a bird might flap if it were really a goddess disguised as a bird. When it came Hannah’s turn to bail, she made a point of switching places with the person beside me, then put her arm around my shoulders and whispered in my ear that even here, she found me very beautiful. I was as near to happy as I have ever been—happy in a profound way, I mean. Glad to be alive, but also glad to be the object of another being’s undivided attention. Her breath was warm on my cheek, and when she pulled away from me, our gaze held for a long moment. I reached across and lifted a strand of hair that had blown across her lips and placed it back over her shoulder. I meant to smile to convey to her something of what I felt, but I don’t think I did. Mr. Hardie had looked at me earlier in the day, and I had felt stone cold, both heavy and weightless at once, and while he seemed to see right through me as if I were no more substantial than air, he also seemed to comprehend my very essence, which filled me with the kind of terror the Virgin Mary must have felt when the angel Gabriel came down. Hannah intimidated me, but not nearly as much as Mr. Hardie did, and I was happy to think that she and I might be friends. A matronly woman named Mrs. Cook broke the silence by saying, “Wasn’t that Penelope Cumberland in the other lifeboat?” No one answered her, and after a moment I replied that I had recognized her, too.
    “Do you remember how she and her husband wormed their way into places at the captain’s table? Now there was a high-and-mighty one for you. Mrs. Cumberland thought the rest of us were beneath her notice, but what people like that don’t think about is that the noticing goes both ways. I overheard the husband and wife quarreling one day, and it seems Mr. Cumberland’s fortune wasn’t quite as secure as the two of them liked us all to believe. The missus said to him, ‘But we can’t sit there—I won’t have the right