The Midnight Watch (22 page)

So I contradicted him. ‘Mr Gill swears in his affidavit that Mr Stone was on the bridge at the time.’

The chief officer did not waver. ‘Mr Gill may say what he likes.
I
was on the bridge.’ He exchanged a brief glance with the captain and then stared straight at me again.

‘Mr Gill has sworn on oath. He will go to prison if he is lying.’

‘Then let him go to prison.’

‘Very well,’ I said. But I did not for one minute believe him.

The chief officer went on to speak of waking the wireless operator at dawn, of receiving the message that the
Titanic
was sinking, of the
Virginian
confirming the position at six o’clock. I had heard it all before.

‘And then,’ I said, ‘I suppose you steamed towards the position for all you were worth?’

‘Yes. For all we were worth.’

‘Racing to the rescue?’

‘Racing to the rescue.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, giving him a weak smile.

‘You are very welcome.’

*   *   *

‘The captain still denies it?’

‘He does.’

‘So it’s donkeyman versus captain?’

‘It is.’

‘And you’re going with the donkeyman?’

‘I am.’

I remembered the Boston pilot telling me I must have made a mistake – that I was missing something, and had set my dogs barking up the wrong tree. No English officer would ignore distress rockets, he’d said. I remembered how Gill’s face had lit up when I offered to pay him five hundred dollars for his story. He had never in his life seen so much money, and most likely never would again. He would probably sign just about anything to get it. I remembered the boldness of the captain’s denials: Bosh! Poppycock! We saw no signals!

I didn’t have one piece of evidence – a document, a photograph – that clinched the matter. But I knew: the captain was lying. I knew because he was tricky with his words. I knew because he was trying to overwhelm us with numbers and technical details. I knew because those closest to him were lying too.

And most of all I knew because, as I’ve said, I’m a good reader of faces. In the captain’s eyes I’d seen a quiet rage that made his lies inevitable. I did not think he was a bad man. He was, Thomas had told me, one of Leyland’s best skippers, a man who’d landed a thousand men on Essex beaches during military manoeuvres – at night, and with their horses. He had never lost a ship, never run aground, never had a collision. He had brought his cargoes to port on time and in good condition. He was known in Liverpool not as a coward, but as a brave and decent man. But somehow, on this voyage, the sea had tricked him – I did not yet know how – so that he had let those rockets go unanswered. And now, fifteen hundred dead! It was an outrage, and his anger, I thought, was as righteous as it was passionate. His mistake, whatever it was, could not deserve such perversely disproportionate consequences. It was his wrath that drove his lies; it had the power, almost, to make them true.

‘The captain’s lying,’ I said. ‘I just know it.’

Krupp looked at me long and hard. ‘You’d better be right,’ he said, and he sent my handwritten copy downstairs to the typesetters and their linotype machines.

Overnight, hundreds of gallons of ink would be pressed onto virgin newsprint, and in the morning two hundred thousand Hearst newspapers would be sent out into the world proclaiming that this unassuming, polite British sea captain had left fifteen hundred people for dead. For the first time in this whole sad business I felt sorry for him.

*   *   *

The story ran with the headline
SAYS HE SAW THE
TITANIC
’S ROCKETS
, followed by an explanatory passage with strong verbs worthy of Bumpton – ‘rushed’, ‘tore’, ‘exclaimed’. I gave readers a straightforward and dramatic account of events. ‘The
Californian
of the Leyland Line was the ship which was sighted by the
Titanic
but which refused to respond to her signals of distress.’ Gill’s affidavit was set out in full. The report was simple and damning.

Krupp, I thought, could not help but be pleased. But when I was seated opposite him and he stared at me with his small black eyes, his face seemed narrower and more disapproving than ever. He wore the same stale white shirt he’d worn the day before, with his tie loose, so that long, wiry tufts of red hair sprouted from behind its knot. He was eating bread and pickles for breakfast.

‘We are not running it in the afternoon edition.’

I thought for a moment he was teasing me. But he wasn’t. ‘It’s a good story,’ I said, wondering what it would take to please this man. ‘You won’t get better.’

‘It
is
a good story. But it’s not an
exclusive
. That drunk over at the
Globe
has got the scoop on you.’ He slid a newspaper across the desk to me.
DENIAL ON THE
CALIFORNIAN
was the headline, followed by a piece that reiterated details from the
Clinton Daily Item
story and went on to report the refutations of Jack Thomas and Captain Lord. ‘The
Herald
has it too,’ Krupp said, ‘down in New York.’

‘But they’re just relying on the carpenter’s story,’ I said. ‘They don’t have the Gill affidavit, and Gill saw the rockets
himself
.’

‘It doesn’t matter who saw what. The story’s the same. The ship saw rockets and didn’t go. Even I’m beginning to tire of it.’ Krupp ate another pickle. For what seemed a very long time he looked at me in silence. He was, I think, wondering what do with me. I decided to help him along.

‘Shall I pack up my things?’

Krupp gave a sharp, snorting laugh. ‘How dramatic!’ he said. ‘John, my friend, you underestimate yourself. I’m not going to sack you. I’m going to reward you.’

I waited.

‘I want you to go back to doing what you do best. I want you to go to Halifax to meet the
Mackay-Bennett
. She’s due any day now, and she has hundreds of bodies aboard. I want you to go up there and take a look at them.’

‘I don’t want to go to Halifax.’

Krupp dropped a piece of pickled bread on the floor. ‘Yes you do. Look at this.’ He passed me another newspaper. ‘That – there. See? Read that.’

The headline was
LINER
BREMEN
SIGHTS 100 OR MORE BODIES
, and two or three paragraphs had been circled in red ink. The passenger ship, in mid-Atlantic on her way to New York less than a week after the disaster, had chanced upon the wreckage, and as she drew closer it became apparent that ‘the black objects bobbing up and down on the water and mixing with the wreckage were bodies of the victims’.

‘You see?’ said Krupp. ‘Your bodies make an appearance at last.’

I read on. The
Bremen
’s passengers had seen a man in formal evening dress lashed to a door; a young man lying on a steamer chair; a girl tied to a wooden grating. Men and women clung to each other, others were still holding onto children. ‘The sight was an awful one to gaze upon,’ said one passenger. ‘I saw the body of a woman with a life preserver strapped to her waist and the bodies of two little children clasped in her arms.’ What must it have been like for these people, I wondered, in those dark minutes after the
Titanic
left them?

I pushed the newspaper away.

‘Strange,’ said Krupp, ‘don’t you think? With hundreds and hundreds of bodies floating about, your man found none of them?’

I could only agree. It was a mystery.

‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘they’ve turned up now. Halifax is perfect for you. The
Mackay-Bennett’
s got Astor and Straus and maybe Butt too. We’ll get you a special pass.’

I sat for a moment. I remembered how, only days earlier, I had searched the
Californian
’s holds, desperate to find these men. But now I did not care about Astor and Straus and Butt. The newspapers of Boston and New York had been filled with nothing else: tributes and double-page spreads and memorial services and toasts in university halls. The whole of America was in grief for them. But
this
story – of what the
Bremen
had seen – was the first I’d read of the dispossessed, the poor, the children. And now they were in the hold of a cableship on its way to Halifax. In a day or so I could see them, if I wanted, laid out on the piers for identification and collection, just like the Shirtwaist girls.

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I’ll go.’

‘Good,’ said Krupp, taking another pickle.

‘But not today.’

He frowned.

‘Nor tomorrow, either,’ I said, rising to leave. ‘The
Californian
has two days left in Boston. I must try again – I need to know what happened.’

‘Oh John, enough about that ship! Why are you bothering yourself with it? You’ve written your piece and the captain has shut up like a clam. You’ll get nothing more from him.’

He may have been right, but I wasn’t thinking of the captain. I was thinking of the second officer, with his wide eyes and honest face. I had seen, the night before, that he was unable to lie. The chief officer had been forced to lie for him. If I could get to him alone, he would tell me what happened. He would answer my question: why didn’t they go?

I could not leave Boston now. Not while that strange and tantalising ship lay so close across the harbour. She was, in a way, the cause of all that lashing and tying and clasping of children in arms. To tell their story, I needed first to understand the
Californian’
s.

‘I’ll go on Sunday, but not before,’ I said, leaving Krupp to his pickles and walking out into the Boston sunshine.

*   *   *

Harriet was at home alone when I visited in the early afternoon. She threw her arms around me with such power my hat was knocked to the floor. When she picked it up, she put it on her own head at a jaunty angle.

‘Come,’ she said, leading me into the parlour, ‘look at
mine
.’ She took an old derby from a nearby table and held it up for my admiration. I saw that she had sewn onto its front – a little crookedly – white, purple and green spangles in the shape of the letter V.

‘V for…?’

‘The vote, of course.’

‘Of course.’

‘And victory!’

Her hair was a blaze of fiery red. Around her neck hung a necklace of fresh flowers. She was very beautiful, but when I looked upon her more closely, I was surprised to see that her crisp white shirtwaist was tucked into a pair of
pants
– oversized pants seemingly made of some type of rubberised canvas.

‘They’re pit brow pants,’ she said, extending a leg stylishly. ‘English girls wear them when they work in the mines. Did you know English girls work in coalmines? Well, they do. They tuck their skirts in, here – see – so they don’t get caught in the wheels of coal wagons. Skirts are forever pulling women to their deaths in English coalmines. So, I’m going to wear them in the New York parade. I don’t care what anybody says. Better to wear clothes that save our lives rather than make us pretty – that’s what my outfit will say.’

My daughter really was a wonder. But when we sat together on the sofa I sensed that something troubled her, and it did not take me long to find out what. Olive, it seemed, would not allow her to wear her pit brow pants in the parade. ‘She says it’s enough that we leave off our corset covers,’ Harriet explained, ‘so the men can see the threads and seams of our bondage.’

‘But you want to go further.’

‘Yes. And I told Mother I was going to wear my pants anyway, no matter what she says.’

‘That’s a courageous stance.’

‘Yes, it is. But now she hates me.’

‘You and me both,’ I said, putting an arm around her shoulder.

It is a feature of young women that they can switch moods without warning, and Harriet now drew away and turned to me stern-faced, as if she had just remembered something.

‘Your story – this morning in the newspaper.’

‘You liked it?’

‘Of course. I like all your stories. But Papa,
why
didn’t the captain come up to see the rockets? You didn’t explain it. You didn’t say
why
.’

‘I don’t know why,’ I said.

‘Then you should find out. Write a longer piece. Get beneath his skin, deep down into his psyche – find out what sort of man he is, and then tell us why he didn’t go.’

‘Psyche?’

‘Yes. You know, his subconscious mind, something in his past, a suppressed memory.’

Harriet, at seventeen years old, was mistress of all the latest notions. But, I thought, perhaps she was right, and for the next few minutes I let the idea settle and grow. It would make a nice Boston story, this exploration of the ‘psyche’ – a subtle, Henry Jamesian tale, perhaps, of secret, shifting motivations.
What Lord Knew
 …

My thoughts were interrupted by a sharp knock at the door. It was a messenger boy from my office, breathless from running. He handed me a piece of paper. ‘Go to the ship now,’ it said. ‘Captain Lord is about to be arrested. File something tonight.’ This last word was double-underlined.

At last, I thought as Harriet helped me with my hat and coat, Gill’s affidavit was beginning to do its work.

*   *   *

It was dark by the time I got to the ship, but the pier was lit by large electric working lights. Gasoline generators hummed and sputtered, longshoremen hauled sacks of grain. The
Californian
seemed smaller than I remembered her, but as I drew closer I saw it was because she was now sitting much lower in the water. Her main deck was barely above the wharf’s timber fenders and the shore gangway sat almost horizontally. Loading was nearly complete. In two days the
Californian
would haul her cargo out into the Atlantic, and I would go to Halifax.

The watchman at the gangway waved me on without question and once again I climbed the internal stairs to the chartroom. I stood at the doorway. The room was full of men. Lord sat upright at the far end of the settee with his arms folded across his chest. Next to him stood a tall, muscular man who seemed far too large for this small space. He was young – American-young, with white teeth and eager eyes. His jacket bore on its lapel a six-pointed silver star and handcuffs hung from his belt. Three pressmen leaned against the chart table, including old Frank from the
Globe
. No one spoke.