The Lifeboat: A Novel (17 page)

PERHAPS IT WAS
the theoretical discussion about the plank and the other lifeboat that started the rumor that Mr. Hardie was still alive. There was an item about it in the newspaper, which Mr. Glover brought to the prison for me to read in contravention of a rule against giving anything to an inmate that hadn’t been cleared in advance.

“If it were true,” he said, “they couldn’t charge you with murder.”

“Why not?” I asked, appalled by the idea that Mr. Hardie might have clawed his way to the surface and found his way to shore.

“Because you wouldn’t have killed anyone!” he said with some surprise, and only when I had thought it through did I realize that he was right, that it was only Mr. Hardie’s death for which we were being prosecuted, not for the deaths of anyone else in the boat, though I must admit it sometimes felt as if we were being blamed for the entire incident, shipwreck and all. When I understood what he was talking about, I was filled with irrational hope until I remembered how Hardie had repeatedly risen up in the water  before he was finally lost to our sight. I could still see the black water dripping from his skeletal face. I could feel the wind sucking at my soul, and I didn’t think I could bear any sort of resurrection where Mr. Hardie was involved.

“It’s a real possibility,” said Mr. Glover. “Some jewels that might be tied to the
Empress Alexandra
have surfaced in New York. Nothing at all is certain yet, but Mr. Reichmann has assigned me the task of investigating the report.”

“If he is alive,” I said, “I doubt he is filled with goodwill toward any of us. I don’t imagine he’ll show up at the trial and say, ‘I’m not dead after all, so no harm done. You can let these women go.’”

“No, I don’t suppose he will,” said Mr. Glover, “but he wouldn’t have to. The very fact of his being alive would be enough.”

“I suppose we’d only be convicted of attempted murder, then,” I said. “What is the penalty for that? And wouldn’t Mr. Hardie be subject to prosecution himself? The judge made it very clear that as a member of the ship’s crew, he wasn’t supposed to ask people to jump overboard the way he did.” I didn’t say that Hardie was a wild man, perfectly useful in life-and-death situations, but unsuited to civilization. I didn’t say that he would protect those who submitted to his care but would have no qualms at all about murdering anyone else, and that we had long since broken the bond that made us one of that protected class. I did suggest, however, that Hardie might have other stories to tell, even lies, about what had happened to some of the others. “I wouldn’t look for him too hard,” I said, shivering in spite of myself. “After all, we did throw him out of the boat.”

“You have a point there,” said Mr. Glover, looking at me with some concern. I realized that I was trembling uncontrollably and that Mr. Glover was unsure of how to calm me, so I said, “Even though I never want to lay eyes on Mr. Hardie again, I suppose I hope he is alive.” I said it because that is what I thought Mr. Glover wanted me to say. He would want me to say it because if Hardie were alive, it would mean I hadn’t killed anyone, and I strongly sensed Mr. Glover wanted to think of me without blood on my hands. Earlier that morning, I had considered asking him to look up Felicity Close and deliver a letter I had written to her, but I immediately thought better of it. I wanted to explain to her that I had loved Henry, that while his fortune is what had initially attracted me, I had loved him with all my heart. I wanted her to know this for Henry’s sake, not for mine. But my instincts about what to say and when to hold back have always been keen, so I said nothing to Mr. Glover about Felicity, and I later ripped up the letter and threw it away. Instead I repeated, “I certainly hope Mr. Hardie is alive!” as forcefully as I could, which freed Mr. Glover to lay a comforting hand on my arm.

The next day, Mr. Reichmann came to the prison to ask me two questions. First, he wanted to know if I had helped to push Mr. Hardie out of the boat; and if the answer to that was yes, he wanted to know at what point I had decided to do it. “I think I helped to push him out,” I answered tentatively. I asked him if he had read my journal, which I had given him over a week before, and he replied that he had; but now he asked me to go through the events that led to Mr. Hardie’s death one more time, for he was confused about whether I had made my way into the back of the boat with the intention of helping Hannah or with the intention of helping Mr. Hardie. “Perhaps you started out with the idea of helping the man you admired and whom you credited with saving your life. Perhaps Mr. Hardie misread your intentions and started to struggle against you, and only then did your efforts shift to the support of Hannah.”

“You are right in thinking that as I moved through the boat I was not at all clear on what I hoped to accomplish.”

“So you moved almost automatically, as if you were following instructions?”

“I don’t think it was automatic. I know I was thinking very hard at the time, wondering about the right thing to do.”

“So you wanted to do the right thing.”

“Yes! I wanted to help the person who…” I stopped myself, initially because I realized that I was going to sound very calculating if I said I wanted to help the person who had the most power in the boat. But I also became aware that Mr. Reichmann was looking at me oddly, with a mixture of amusement and fascination on his face, and it occurred to me that he had given me the answer to his question and was wondering what was taking me so long to realize it. When I stopped talking so abruptly, his face clouded with a shadow of irritation. But I couldn’t decide if it was irritation that I was slow to recognize the core of my defense or that I had caught myself before some truth escaped my lips. Or perhaps it was only irritation that the hour was getting late, for just then he took out his pocket watch, remarked on the time, and announced that he was late for a meeting with another client. “We must make better use of our time together,” he said, sounding very much like Dr. Cole, which in turn irritated me, for I did not like Dr. Cole, whereas I was beginning to admire Mr. Reichmann very much.

“Sleep on it,” he said. “I think there is a very real possibility that you had no intention of participating in Mr. Hardie’s death and that you only decided to help Hannah at the last moment. If that is the case, it would be good to know before the hearing tomorrow. Tomorrow is when we have to enter our plea. Your codefendants plan to plead self-defense, which means that they admit to the killing, but contend that they only killed because they saw Mr. Hardie as a threat to their lives and to the lives of others. You must choose between not guilty by reason of self-defense and outright innocence. We will talk about it in the morning before we go to court.”

I spent a restless night going over and over the incident in my mind, searching for anything I might have forgotten or for new ways to interpret the events of that day. There was no question that Hannah and Mrs. Grant intended to kill Mr. Hardie. As for their claim that he had put us all in danger, I can only say that that argument was the only one they could make. Was it true? We were in grave danger, but had Mr. Hardie’s actions become a part of that danger? I think that once the two women had declared themselves against him, a dangerous situation existed in the boat, but was the blame for that really Hardie’s or was it the fault of the two women for pushing an opposing point of view? And if it was the fault of the two women, did that mean that the only justifiable course of action for them would have been to sit passively in the boat and do what they were told, without anything to say about the best way to get ourselves rescued? But in the end, that was not the question I had to decide. I had only to decide what Mr. Reichmann should tell the judge on my behalf.

At the courthouse the next morning, I was the one worried about the time. The hearing was set to begin at ten o’clock, but by quarter to ten, Mr. Reichmann had yet to arrive. Hannah and Mrs. Grant had gone off to conference rooms with their attorneys, and I was left to sit on a bench in a long hallway with the matron, alternately certain that Mr. Reichmann would do nothing to jeopardize my case and filled with misgivings and doubt. “Where is my attorney?” I asked the matron over and over again; and over and over she answered me in her kind Irish voice, “He’ll be here. I know Mr. Reichmann, and he is as reliable as they come.” When he finally appeared, I swallowed my mounting anger and said, “Are you all right? I worried that some accident had befallen you!”

He was all smiles, with none of the mixed signals of the day before. “Don’t worry, the hearing has been rescheduled for noon,” he told me as he placed his briefcase on the floor by his feet. It seemed that someone might have informed me of the change, but I was so filled with relief that I soon forgot the anguish his tardiness had caused me. The matron left us alone, and he sat next to me on the bench and said, “Have you thought about what I asked you?” in such a way that I again sensed there was a correct answer to the question, and I was momentarily confused about what I was expected to say. I ended by telling him the truth, and I fervently hoped it coincided with what he wanted to hear. I looked into his eyes, which were no longer filled with amusement, but seemed to be deep, dark pools of concern, and said, “When I went toward Mr. Hardie and Hannah, I was not at all sure what I was going to do. I think I was seeking some course of action that would restore the atmosphere in the lifeboat to what it had been before Mrs. Grant sought to prove that Mr. Hardie was guilty of something. Of course that was folly on my part, for what could I, who was no match for any one of them, do to heal the rift that had opened and that threatened us all?”

“So we plead innocent!” cried Mr. Reichmann, slapping his hand on his thigh. Seeing him so pleased with me made me happy in a strange way, but my happiness was clouded by a weird sensation that I was in the lifeboat again, that I was again choosing without really knowing the consequences of my choice; but the sensation was fleeting, and I walked calmly into the courtroom, glad that there was nothing more I needed to do, glad that I could now sit back and let Mr. Reichmann do his work.

Throughout the fall and winter, Mr. Glover continued to smuggle in articles about the wreck of the
Empress Alexandra.
Once, he brought me what was thought to be a complete list of the survivors, and while Hardie’s name was absent, we agreed that there was no way of accounting for someone who didn’t want to be found. Another time, he brought me an article that focused on the crew of the sunken ship. The article went on at some length about Captain Sutter, who had spent most of his forty-two years at sea and who had left behind a wife and two daughters. Just as my heart was clenching with sympathy on the daughters’ behalf, the name Brian Blake jumped out at me from where it had been lying in wait a few sentences farther along. I asked Mr. Glover to let me keep the paper and promised not to implicate him if the matron were to find it in my possession. When he had gone, I sat staring at the section I have transcribed here until it was time for supper.

It didn’t seriously occur to me that the unnamed man was anyone other than John Hardie, and I lay awake that night trying to come up with explanations that accounted for William Smith’s story and also for what I already knew about Hardie and Blake. Was there bad blood between the two men because of some incident where Hardie had been blamed for Blake’s misdeeds, or had the men been partners in something underhanded for which Blake was lucky enough to be exonerated but Hardie wasn’t? And if they had been partners at some point in the past, might they also have been partners when it came to removing a chest of gold from the safekeeping room of the
Empress Alexandra
? I knew firsthand that Blake had a key to the room, but he could never have carried the heavy chest alone. If the two men were busy with that enterprise, they would have been nowhere near the radio room and so would not have known that the wireless was broken and that no distress signals had been sent. This would explain their reluctance to leave the vicinity of the wreck. Finally, I asked myself if they were rescuing the gold on their own initiative or on orders from someone else, and I found I couldn’t blame them for trying to steal the gold if that is in fact what they had done.

Just after dawn, I folded the newspaper clipping into a small square and tucked it under the edge of my mattress. I realized too late that Florence was awake and staring at me through the gloom. “What’s that?” she hissed. “If you don’t tell me, I’ll call the matron.”

“What are you talking about, Florence?” I answered as calmly as I could. I didn’t want the article to be taken from me. Perhaps I saw it as the key to something or perhaps I only felt about it the way all prisoners feel about their small store of possessions. In any case, trying to make sense of it gave me something to do.

“You put something under your mattress,” said Florence, poking her narrow face between the bars. “I saw you do it. I saw it with my own two eyes.”

“Then you’re seeing things again,” I replied, adding a note of concern to my voice. I knew that Florence desperately wanted to be believed, so I added: “The matron will come to look and find nothing because nothing is there, and then she will have another reason to think you’re insane.” Florence gave me her wounded look, but she became quiet, and just in time, for it wasn’t two minutes later that the matron came through, ringing her bell.