No one went to dinner. The ship was pitching and rolling so much that it would be worth your life to try to walk around. The thought of eating was nauseating anyway. I kept my bucket in the bunk with me until I had nothing left in my stomach to barf up. Only by gripping the grab bar with both hands could I prevent myself from being thrown out of bed.
Waves and rain pounded my little porthole over and over again. The ship creaked until I was sure the rumors about her lousy construction were true and she was breaking apart. I could hear foghorns blaring as the ships in the convoy tried to keep from crashing into each other. I thought I could hear the Smit girls crying and occasionally an Irish curse from Ronan. I screamed myself several times, the loudest when I swear the ship was standing on end.
I heard the bells for the watch change at six in the morning and the sound of feet overhead. The storm was abating, thank God. My heart was pounding and I had sweated through my heavy clothing.
Before long I felt I could stand up, though I was dizzy when I did. I changed into dry clothes, shivering with cold. After buttoning up my peacoat, pulling on my watch cap and buckling my life preserver, I went to my door and opened it.
‘Is everyone OK?’ I called out. Ronan opened his door. Gil followed. He had a bruise forming on his forehead. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
‘Damn grab bar pulled loose from the bulkhead and I banged my head. I’m fine,’ he said.
I went down the hall, still bouncing off the bulkheads, and knocked on the Smits’ door.
Mrs Smit opened the door. ‘We are fine,’ she said in her heavy Dutch accent. ‘But hungry. The girls are getting dressed to go to breakfast.’ We were all hungry now that the ship was on a stable keel. Most of us had missed dinner.
Olive met me in the passageway. ‘Blanche still isn’t in her room, the dope. Where do you think she is?’ she said.
‘We’ll find out soon enough, I guess,’ I said. I was losing patience with Blanche. We all had enough to worry about without babysitting her.
Blanche was in the wardroom, calm as she could be, eating cornflakes and canned fruit from the cold breakfast that had been set out for us.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, before Olive and I had a chance to reprimand her. ‘I waited a second too long on deck and couldn’t make it to my berth without risking injury. I spent the storm in a utility closet – very uncomfortable it was, too. I hope you weren’t worried.’
‘Of course we were,’ I said, setting down my tray. Olive didn’t join us; she was too annoyed with Blanche. She took her tray and went to sit with the Smits, Ronan and Gil.
‘Well, don’t be. I can take care of myself.’
‘None of us can take care of ourselves completely. We all need help sometimes.’
She didn’t answer me. We finished breakfast in silence.
All hands were on deck. Seamen rushed through the breakfast line, ate standing up and returned to their posts as soon as they were done. Some were wearing soaked foul-weather gear, which must have meant they were on deck during the gale. I couldn’t imagine it.
All of us passengers trooped outside, swathed in the usual layers of sweaters, coats, scarves and mittens. The gale was well past us, but it was still freezing outside. Otherwise, the sea was calm and even the sun shone occasionally through white clouds. The smokers in our crowd lit their cigarettes immediately and Ronan lit his pipe while the Smits and I watched the chaos on deck.
Despite the frenetic preparations for the gale, ropes, cables, electrical cords, pieces of tarp and unidentifiable – to me, anyway – detritus littered the deck. Seamen pushed water off the side of the ship with wide brooms and mops. Others secured vehicle cables that had slipped off the cargo. Tom and the gunners removed the tarps protecting the artillery and checked the guns by firing them in short bursts.
We were shocked to see an ambulance hanging by one cable off the side of the ship. The master, Popeye and the chief engineer were talking about what to do while a group of seamen waited for instructions.
‘We should cut it loose, sir,’ the engineer said. ‘It’s just one vehicle.’
‘But it’s an ambulance, not just another jeep,’ Popeye said. ‘Our boys will need it.’
‘What’s likely to happen if we try to retrieve it?’ the master asked.
‘We could damage the ship,’ the engineer said. ‘Dragging it up the side of the ship over the rail could tear up the railing and part of the hull. It’s not worth it.’
‘Can’t we use a winch?’
‘Not at sea. Not safely, anyway. Without the ship secured in a dock, the winch might not hold,’ he said.
‘All right,’ the master said. ‘Cut the ambulance loose, damn it.’
‘Master, sir,’ Tom said, appearing by the master’s side.
‘Yes?’
‘The commodore destroyer is signaling us. Permission to answer, sir.’
‘Granted,’ the master said. ‘How many signalmen do you have?’
‘Two, sir.’
‘Set them both up. One to communicate with the Evans, one to communicate with the convoy.’
‘Yes, sir.’
If there was still a convoy. Fortunately, we were still near the Evans, but I saw few of our companion ships nearby. They were bound to have been scattered by the storm. And I knew that radio contact would continue to be minimal. It made sense that German submarines, knowing that the convoy was disorganized, might be nearby, waiting for an opportunity to sink as many of our cargo ships as they could.
‘Master,’ a seaman said, approaching while the master watched a couple of seamen with blowtorches cut through the cable which dangled the ambulance over the edge of the ship.
‘Yes.’
‘The chief engineer needs you to see something.’
‘OK,’ the master said, turning to follow him. No one was paying a whit of attention to Olive or me, so we trailed behind him, curious. We came upon a group examining a rent in the deck aft, several feet long, big enough for us to gasp.
‘Goddamn welds!’ the master cursed, ignoring the rule against swearing in front of women. ‘Goddammit! How bad is it?’
‘We can repair it,’ the engineer said. ‘But if it keeps tearing …’ He shook his head.
‘How will you repair it?’ the master asked.
‘Sheet metal to cover it,’ the chief engineer said. ‘All tied together with metal straps and bolts. But there’s another thing.’
‘What now?’
‘We’ll need to inspect the skin of the entire ship. Inside and out. There could be more.’
‘All right. Do it.’
Tom appeared at the master’s side again. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘the commodore ship is sending a launch with the Evans’ executive officer to confer with you.’
‘Good.’
‘It’s on its way.’
‘Winch down the accommodation staircase and I’ll be right there.’
During the pause that followed, I gathered the courage to speak to the master.
‘Sir,’ I said. The master turned around and seemed surprised to see Olive and me standing there.
‘You should be below,’ he said. ‘You’re in the way on deck.’
‘We’d like to help,’ Olive said. ‘With something. Something useful.’
‘Anything,’ I said. I’d felt useless watching the officers and seamen struggling to get the ship back in operation. I wasn’t used to standing around watching other people labor when there was plenty of work to go around.
‘You know,’ he said. ‘You can help. We’ve got several injured men. This is the pharmacist’s mate’s first cruise. I doubt he knows what to do.’
‘I’ll go get my medical bag,’ Olive said.
‘The injured men are in the first-aid room,’ the master said.
‘I know where it is,’ I said to Olive. ‘I’ll meet you there.’
When I got to the first-aid room, I found several battered men outside in the hall waiting to be seen, including one with a horrendous black eye.
‘I hope you’re here to help us, ma’am,’ he said to me. ‘I don’t think that pharmacist’s mate knows what he’s doing. He’s really hurting the guy in there.’
I heard a yelp from inside the first-aid room, just as Olive appeared in the corridor with her medical bag. The injured men seemed quite relieved to see her. She looked like one of the army nurses in a recruitment poster, radiating determination and confidence. She knocked on the door and went in without an answer. ‘I’ll get you an ice pack for that eye,’ I said to the seaman with the black eye. ‘It looks awful.’
‘It hurts like anything, ma’am,’ he said.
Inside the first-aid room I found Olive reprimanding the pharmacist’s mate, whose surname was Isted. ‘You cannot treat a man with a burn that severe without a painkiller,’ she said. ‘It’s cruel.’
The injured man’s wound was ghastly. I guessed it was second degree – bright red, swollen and already blistering. It covered a large part of his forearm and the palm of his hand.
‘But, ma’am,’ Isted said, ‘protocol is that I examine and clean the wound first.’
‘Nuts to that,’ she said. ‘Is there any morphine in the medicine chest?’
Isted handed over the chest and Olive found a syringe and a vial of morphine. ‘Here we go; you’ll feel better in a few minutes,’ she said to the injured man. ‘What’s your name? How did this happen?’
The man was a wiper from the engine room. He was soaked with sweat and oil. He and his fellow wipers and oilers had spent hours furiously working to keep the engine functioning during the gale. ‘I’m Ordinary Seaman Price,’ he said. ‘I tripped and fell on to the boiler. It hurts so much!’
Olive expertly drew out morphine from the vial with the syringe and injected him. She turned to the pharmacist’s mate.
‘Isted,’ she said, ‘when a man is this pale and shaky, he is probably in shock. He needs to lie down and elevate his legs.’ The two of them helped the injured man recline while I located some pillows. ‘Would you please clean the oil away from the burn with alcohol,’ she asked the pharmacist’s mate. ‘Don’t touch the wound itself. We’ll wait until the morphine kicks in to dress it.’
‘Ma’am,’ Isted said, ‘you just tell me what you want me to do and I will do it.’
‘Olive, I need an ice pack for a seaman with a black eye,’ I said.
‘Let me get it for you,’ Isted said, opening a cabinet and pulling out an ice pack and filling it with ice from a small freezer.
‘Make sure you wrap that in a cloth of some kind,’ Olive said to him. ‘Otherwise, it could be too cold and damage the tissue. Louise, can you triage the others in the hall, too?’
‘I’ll do my best.’
Isted gazed at Olive as though he was in the presence of a goddess. I figured his education was little more than a couple of weeks’ worth of basic first aid and he could see that Olive knew what she was doing.
Out in the passageway the waiting men had slumped to the floor, their backs resting on the bulkhead. The man with the black eye looked the worst: the eye was swollen shut so that even his eyelashes weren’t visible and the bruising around it had darkened. I knelt next to him and held up two fingers in front of his face. ‘How many fingers do you see?’ I asked. The man squinted with his good eye.
‘I can’t really tell – they’re all blurry.’
‘You’re next.’ I handed him the ice pack, which he accepted gratefully, gingerly applying it to his eye.
Another seaman had a deep cut on his thigh which he was holding together with the fingers of one hand and a tightly wound scarf.
‘You’re third,’ I said.
‘It’s not that bad,’ he answered. ‘It’s not bleeding much now.’
‘You’re going to need stitches,’ I said. ‘You can’t keep holding that wound together.’
Back in the first-aid room, I found Olive spreading sulfadiazine ointment on the oiler’s wound with a tongue depressor.
‘But I can’t go to my bunk,’ he was saying to Olive. ‘I’m on watch.’
Olive began to bandage the wound. ‘This is a severe burn. When the morphine wears off, it will be very painful again. You’ll need another shot in six hours; meet me back here and I’ll take care of it. As for working, you must avoid infection. That means no dirt and oil. Get clean and stay that way, for several days. If you get any grief from the chief engineer, just tell me and I’ll talk to him.’ My money was on Olive’s instructions being followed to the letter.
After the wiper left, the man with the black eye slid on to the gurney which served as an examination table. Olive felt around his eye while he moaned. Then she pried his eyelid open to check his eye.
‘That’s as bad a shiner as I’ve ever seen,’ she said. ‘I think you may have an orbital fracture.’
‘What’s that?’ Isted asked.
‘The bone around his eye socket is cracked,’ she said. ‘But the eye looks OK.’
‘How can you tell?’ he asked.
‘Here – feel it,’ she said, guiding Isted’s fingers. ‘Feel the bone give?’
The seaman yelped.
‘Yeah, I feel it.’
‘Am I going to go blind in that eye?’ the seaman asked, frightened.
‘Not if you do as I say. You need to rest for several days in case you have a concussion. Louise, can you walk him back to his bunk?’
‘Sure,’ I said.
‘Who else is waiting in the hall?’ she asked me.
‘A seaman who needs stitches and a few bumps and bruises.’
‘Do you know how to stitch up a cut?’ she asked Isted.
‘I’ve practiced on pigs’ feet, but I’ve not done a person yet.’
‘Now’s your chance,’ she said.
As I guided the wiper out into the hall, I sent the seaman who needed stitches inside.
‘That woman is practically a doctor,’ the man with the shiner said to the seaman as I guided him past.
I figured that ten years of nursing, much of it during wartime, could make a nurse practically a doctor. I was glad she was on our ship. We might need her again before we reached Liverpool.
After lunch – another cold meal – we went up on deck. Being confined below, even in the wardroom, after the frightening twenty-four hours we’d spent in our bunks during the gale, was too much. We wanted to be out in the fresh air. And fresh and crisp it was – twelve degrees above zero! We split off in the usual groups. The Smit family watched a signalman work on the bow. His careful arm signals, moving in set patterns, communicated with the ships in our convoy without using the radio, which might alert submarines. A stack of flags, all with different patterns, were piled in a box at his feet. The signalman wore a Navy uniform, which meant that he was part of the Navy Armed Guard under Tom’s command. Another signalman worked at the stern. At lunch, Tom had told us one was ‘talking’ to the commodore ship and another broadcasting our coordinates to the visible ships in the convoy. Those in turn would signal to the ships they could see and so on. Tom said twenty ships were out of formation. It could take a couple of days to collect the convoy together again. He didn’t say so, but I knew we’d be vulnerable to attack while we waited.
Gil and Ronan took up their usual spot at the ship’s rail, watching the launch from the commodore ship heading our way.
For once, Blanche joined Olive and me. We walked the length of the ship and back, enjoying the exercise. We found the engineer’s mate driving the last rivet into the repair tear in the deck. The tear was completely covered with sheet metal, secured around the edges by what looked like enough ties, bolts and rivets to hold the entire ship together.
‘Think it’s going to hold?’ Blanche asked.
‘I do,’ he said. ‘There’s been no further tearing. And a dozen seamen have rappelled down the hull of the ship to inspect the hull. It’s intact.’
The launch arrived and was met by our master, Chief Popeye and Tom. The knowledge of military uniforms I’d acquired in DC wasn’t much help in identifying the contingent from the Evans, since they were all dressed in arctic foul-weather gear. I would guess that the officer who saluted and then shook hands with the master was the executive officer, as the commanding officer wouldn’t leave the ship. He was accompanied by two others with insignia on their caps that I didn’t recognize. After saluting and shaking hands, the group climbed to the bridge deck, where I could see them huddled together over the navigation map.
‘I wonder what’s going on?’ Olive asked.
‘They’re figuring out how to get the convoy together and on course again,’ Blanche said. ‘They can’t use the radio.’
Every cargo ship on its own at sea was in terrible danger.
After a few more minutes of wandering around the deck, the freezing weather defeated us and we turned and headed back amidships. Fewer seamen were now occupied with deck chores. Most of the mess caused by the storm had been cleaned up. I intended to spend the afternoon in my bunk by myself, reading or napping – I didn’t care much which one. When we approached the superstructure, I noticed the group on the bridge still huddled together, talking. The officers wouldn’t rest until all the convoy ships were in formation again, with the defensive warships guarding their perimeter. No naps for them.
Blanche was gazing out across the deck. Olive and I followed her gaze and saw Tom calibrating the sight on one of the anti-aircraft guns. He saw us and waved. Blanche smiled, but she turned away, as if she didn’t want us to notice, tripping over one of the many coils of rope that littered the deck. She might have fallen hard on a nearby metal stanchion except a seaman passing by caught her. Oddly, it seemed to me that her savior tried to turn and walk away quickly. But Blanche grasped him by his arm – to thank him, I assumed.
Instead, she screamed. And screamed again. The seaman, who was the red-headed man who’d joined the crew late while the passengers boarded back at the Navy Yard in DC, backed away. But Blanche kept her hold on him.
‘Why are you here?’ she shouted. ‘Why? Are you following me?’
‘Mrs Bryant,’ the seaman began in a British accent, ‘I didn’t mean to shock you. Really I didn’t!’
Blanche turned to us while still hanging on to the seaman. ‘It’s Nigel!’ she shouted.
‘Who?’ I answered, puzzled.
‘Nigel Ramsey, my late husband’s orderly. He’s not a seaman! Why is he on this ship? He must be spying on me!’
‘Ma’am,’ Nigel said, ‘I had no other …’
‘Shut up!’ Blanche shouted. ‘You always thought I killed Eddie! Did his parents hire you to spy on me?’
By this time a clutch of gawkers had gathered, enough that Tom had to push them aside to reach us. Olive and I had peeled Blanche’s hands off Nigel, trying to calm her down. Nigel rubbed his arm where she’d gripped him.
‘Blanche,’ Olive said, ‘we’ll get to the bottom of this. Let’s go down to my cabin and I’ll give you something for your nerves.’
‘Don’t try to placate me,’ Blanche said. ‘I want to know what’s going on!’
‘So do I,’ the master’s voice boomed. He and Popeye stood at my shoulder.
‘Mrs Bryant,’ the master said, controlling his voice with difficulty, ‘I’m trying to keep us from being shot out of the water. I don’t have time for your personal problems. You,’ he said, pointing at her and then at Nigel, ‘you get to my cabin and wait there for me. Mrs Pearlie, I’d like you to join us. Ensign Banks, I have no authority to command you to do anything, but I want you there, too. Understand?’
‘Yes, sir, I do.’
The master’s cabin wasn’t a lot larger than my berth. He had his own tiny lavatory and a small desk in addition to the standard bunk, but the floor space was still tight. None of us dared to sit on his bunk or desk chair, so we leaned against the bulkheads and waited. The master leaned against the cabin door with his arms crossed as if preventing us from escaping. A vein in his forehead pulsated. He was angry, and most of his anger was directed at Blanche.
‘What in the name of bloody hell do you think you are doing, screaming and squabbling on deck like that! You must be a moron not to understand the danger we’re in. We’re missing seventeen ships from this convoy, and we have to give them some time to find us, if they haven’t been blown out of the water already. And we’ve been ordered to tow a corvette with engine damage while it’s being repaired. So the entire convoy – or what’s left of it – will travel at three knots for two days. After that, the rest of the convoy will proceed at full speed ahead of us, whether we can join them or not. Right now, a rowboat could keep up with us! All hands have been on watch for twenty-four hours! And I have to leave the bridge to deal with this! If I had known that you’d booked on my ship again, I would have forbidden it. You caused enough trouble on our last voyage.’
Blanche responded quietly. ‘I didn’t cause you any trouble, Master; my late husband did. He’s the one who rolled himself off the ship. You might recollect that the police, whom you felt had to be notified when we reached port, found no reason to suspect me of anything.’
The master pressed his fingers against his forehead before answering. ‘All right, forget it. So what was your public screaming fit about?’
Blanche pointed at Nigel. ‘This man. You might recognize him. He’s masquerading as a merchant seaman. He’s Nigel Ramsey, my late husband’s orderly. I think he must be spying on me, maybe for my husband’s family. They think I murdered him – thanks in part to you.’
The master jerked forward and grabbed Nigel’s watch cap off his head, revealing his full head of red hair. ‘By God, it is you! What the hell are you doing here? Show me your seaman’s card.’
Nigel pulled his identification card out of his shirt pocket and handed it over to the master, who read the name on it. ‘Alan Starkey,’ he said. ‘Where did you get this? Did you steal it?’
‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘I found it.’
‘Sure you did. I should throw you in the brig! Is Mrs Bryant correct? Are you spying on her?’
Nigel glanced at Blanche before he spoke to the master. ‘Master, I swear to you I had no idea that Mrs Bryant would be on this ship. I just wanted to get back to England. When Mr Bryant’s family fired me, they didn’t pay me! I couldn’t find a job because I didn’t have a reference from them. I slept in churches and ate at soup kitchens! When I found the seaman’s card, I got the idea to work my way back to England. It was just luck I wound up on the Amelia Earhart.’
The master stared at Nigel, but he didn’t blink. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We need every man we have, and you seem to have done acceptable work. You get back to your station and don’t tell a soul about this conversation or I’ll keelhaul you. Got it?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Nigel said. He was out of the door in two seconds flat.
‘But, Master—’ Blanche began.
He raised his hand to stop her. ‘It’s not against maritime law to send a woman to the brig,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to hear a word from you, or about you, or about your late husband, again. Understand?’
Blanche was white with fury, but she had the sense to know the conversation was over. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Mrs Pearlie, you are here because I want you to know what’s going on, so that you can talk sense into this woman when it’s required. Understand?’
I nodded. I was appalled to be given the task of supervising Blanche, but I could see it was unavoidable.
The master turned on Tom next. ‘Ensign Bates,’ he said, ‘you do realize there are strict regulations against fraternizing with the casual passengers aboard, do you not?’
Tom opened his mouth, surprised. ‘Sir, I don’t know what you mean.’
‘This ship is rife with rumors that you and Mrs Bryant are romancing each other while we are trying to get across miles of frozen ocean to the UK without getting our asses blown off by a torpedo finding its way to our hold full of munitions.’
‘That’s just ship gossip. I swear Mrs Bryant and I are only friends,’ Tom said.
‘I don’t give a damn what you swear,’ he said. ‘You focus on your job or I’ll see that you lose your commission.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Get out of my sight, all of you.’
I got as far out of everyone’s sight as I could. I needed to be alone to think, and I didn’t want to be squashed in my tiny berth. Dressed in three layers of clothing, my peacoat and watch hat, I wandered the deck looking for a spot to be alone and think. I found myself standing next to the train locomotive traveling to Europe on the deck of the Amelia Earhart. It was so out of place at sea, even more so than the other vehicles, that it brought a smile to my face. So I climbed into it and sat right down at the controls. I’d ridden on plenty of trains, but never in the engine. The levers, dials and buttons meant nothing to me, but in that space I had the quiet I needed to think.
Maybe I’d worked for a spy organization long enough now that every odd incident looked like a conspiracy, but Eddie Bryant’s death niggled at me, even though suicide was an obvious explanation. The man was crippled for life, his marriage was unhappy and, according to everyone who knew him, he had a vile disposition. He was mean to his wife, his orderly and the passengers who tried to be friendly with him.
I remembered how brave Phoebe’s son, Milt, had been when he came home after he lost his left arm. Yes, he drank too much for a time, yes, he was short-tempered occasionally, yes, he spent hours on his bed with his cigarettes and records some days, but his basic attitude was to move on with his life, even if he didn’t know how. He insisted on working, even though the only job he could find at first was as an elevator operator. He made himself go out with old friends despite his self-consciousness. He practiced doing everyday tasks with one arm. It seemed that Eddie Bryant had not possessed any such admirable qualities.
So perhaps Bryant had killed himself. But I wondered. Why did Blanche spend no time with him, and why did he dislike her so much? I thought that must be due to problems in the marriage before his injury. Were she and Tom having an affair, either on the way from England to the States or on this voyage? Or both? It seemed likely; she was absent from her berth so much that if she wasn’t with him, what was she doing? Of course, they would both deny it. I hated to think that Tom might be involved in Eddie Bryant’s death, but reason required me to accept that possibility. Where was Tom when Eddie was left alone on deck? If he wasn’t on watch, he could have been with Blanche. Blanche said she’d been elsewhere on deck, but had anyone seen her? Why did Nigel leave Eddie alone at the rail of the ship for the time it took him to fetch a cigarette lighter from their stateroom? Just about everyone on board ship smoked; Nigel could have bummed a match from a passing seaman. And could it be a coincidence that Nigel signed on to the Amelia Earhart for its return trip to England? If it wasn’t a coincidence, what was his reason? Was he spying on Blanche on behalf of the Bryant family? And Tom, too? My head was aching with the effort of sorting it all out. In the end I had nothing. Just a series of events that I couldn’t link together in any way that indicated that Eddie Bryant’s death was anything other than suicide.
I was thinking of going back to my berth when I heard Grace singing. That woman had a lovely voice. The mellow sound of ‘Take the A Train’ floated up to me, reminding me of records and the radio, which I missed so much. I poked my head out of the engine window. ‘Hi, Grace,’ I called out. ‘I’m up here!’
I startled her. She jerked back and looked up at me, her hand on her heart. ‘Oh, my goodness, Mrs Pearlie! You scared me!’
‘Come on up and join me,’ I said. ‘The view is great.’
Grace looked around, checking to see if anyone saw her. Then she climbed the few steps to the locomotive cab to join me. ‘What on earth possessed you to come up here?’ she asked, as she sat next to me in the cab.
‘I couldn’t bear the thought of my little berth or of making small talk in the wardroom, and it’s cold on deck. Up here, the windows in the cab keep out the wind.’
‘There aren’t many places to go on this ship to get away,’ she said. ‘I’m the only colored woman on board this trip, so I have my own berth, but it’s right next to the galley. It’s so noisy! And since the cooks have to fix food for all the watches, it’s noisy twenty-four hours a day!’
From our perch we watched the crew get a cable on the crippled corvette. A dinghy with several seamen, hunched into their collars with their sou’westers pulled low over their faces, carried the line, which uncoiled from a winch on our deck, to the corvette. Its crewmembers hauled the line aboard and fastened it to a stanchion.
‘I hope it doesn’t take long for the corvette’s engines to be repaired. We’re sitting ducks out here,’ I said.
‘I heard in the mess that it should only take a couple of days. Then the convoy will have to return to its regular speed and course.’
‘What if all the scattered ships haven’t found us yet?’
She shrugged. ‘We’ll keep signaling and sounding our foghorns. But if they don’t link up, they’re on their own.’
We weren’t even a third of the way to our destination yet. That was a long way for a single ship without an armed escort to travel over this cold and deadly ocean.
Grace and I both fell silent, thinking, I assumed, of the same thing: the fate of the ships that didn’t make it back to the convoy. Then I heard Grace sniffling, and when I looked at her, I saw tears running down her face.
‘Sweetie,’ I said, ‘what’s wrong?’
‘Everything,’ she said, and leaned her head on my shoulder, sobbing.
I didn’t know what to do except to comfort her as best I could. I put an arm around her shoulder, lent her my handkerchief and patted her hand.
‘Can I help?’ I said. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t say anything. I don’t dare. If it got out!’
‘You can tell me anything,’ I said. ‘I’m good at keeping secrets.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes, really.’
‘You won’t tell?’
‘Of course not.’
‘It’s Nigel!’ she said, and then burst into tears again.
Nigel? The only Nigel I knew was Eddie Bryant’s orderly, who’d posed as a seaman to get a ride back to England. Could he be the person Grace was crying over?
‘Nigel and me … well, he’s my sweetheart. OK! You’re shocked, I know,’ Grace said.
Not shocked so much as concerned. Segregation of the colored race from the rest of society was the law in the United States. And a romantic relationship between a man and woman of different races would be just plain dangerous to any couple tempted to date or marry. I had been raised to believe that miscegenation was wrong, but I had lived in DC for two years, where I had met every sort of person from banished kings to homosexuals. My brain was my own and I’d concluded that segregation and prejudice were wrong. I admired Eleanor Roosevelt’s fight against it. So I was more worried for Grace than I was shocked.
Of course, Britain wasn’t segregated. Grace and Nigel could court there.
‘You see,’ Grace said, ‘we got to be friends on the voyage from England to the States. Nigel was Mr Bryant’s orderly, you know. And Nigel was always kind to him. I don’t know how he did it day after day. Anyway, when I was off watch, I sometimes sat with Mr Bryant so Nigel could take a break.’
A loud huzzah sounded from the ship, as the cable between the damaged corvette and the Amelia Earhart held. I felt the ship shudder as the cable went taut.
‘Everyone has said Mr Bryant was unpleasant,’ I said.
‘Once when I came to sit with him, I went into the room just as he threw an ashtray at Mr Gil. Later Mr Gil told me he only offered to play cards with him. And Nigel said that Mr Bryant kept saying that he wasn’t responsible for the plane crash, that there was something wrong with the plane. He said he would sue the people responsible for crippling him when he got home.
‘Who was he going to sue? Hitler? Anyway, once Mr Bryant was settled in bed with his book at night, Nigel would come on deck and we’d find a spot to sit and talk. We couldn’t go to the mess hall for fear people would stare at us. We liked each other. Is that such a crime?’
‘No, it’s not,’ I said.
‘After Mr Bryant died, Nigel was in an awful spot. He had no place to stay and no job. He just wanted to get back to England, but he didn’t have the money for a ticket. My auntie let him sleep on the sofa. I knew I would be headed back to England in a few weeks and we wanted to be together.’
‘Nigel said he found the ID card,’ I said.
‘No. I bought it from an old seaman who had lost his leg,’ Grace said. ‘I knew that cargo ships were always short-handed, so Nigel just showed up at the Amelia Earhart and got a spot on the departure day. We were lucky.’
‘What are you and Nigel going to do when we get to Liverpool?’
I’d asked the wrong question. Grace started to cry again.
‘Sweetie, don’t; it’ll be OK,’ I said.
By now my handkerchief was too damp to do her much good, so Grace wiped her face with her scarf. ‘Nigel said that the master almost put him in the brig! What if he has him arrested when we get to Liverpool?’
‘I heard that conversation,’ I said. ‘The master was much angrier at Blanche than he was with Nigel. He said Nigel was a good worker and he needed him to stay on duty. I bet once we get to Liverpool we can talk the master into letting Nigel off the hook. He should stay out of the master’s way until then. And the two of you need to be careful, too.’ It might be legal in England for Nigel and Grace to court, but most of the people on board were Americans. And England wasn’t short of racial prejudice either, despite its laws.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘We are careful. Even if we do make it to Liverpool without getting drowned and Nigel doesn’t get arrested, I’ll only have a couple of weeks off before I get a new assignment. And I can’t resign from the merchant marine during wartime.’
I wanted to tell her that if Nigel loved her, he’d wait for her, but it seemed like such a platitude that I didn’t say anything. It was wartime. Nothing was guaranteed.
On the third morning after the gale, the corvette’s engine fired up and its crew cast off our cable line. A huzzah went up from our seamen on deck as it was reeled in. The Evans signaled us to increase our speed to nine knots and remain on course.
Three of the ships in our convoy never found us. All three were cargo ships. Three cargo ships without a defensive escort. If they weren’t lost for good, we just had to pray they could find their own way to Liverpool. It was impossible to use the radio to try to locate them; it would broadcast our own position to the enemy. The only use of the radio that was allowed was reception, short bursts of weather forecasts or enemy sightings. So if a German submarine surfaced in our midst, we could broadcast that! The three Sparks spent most of their time stretched out on a cot in the radio room reading comic books.
We didn’t have any idea what was happening in the rest of the world. I thought I would miss the world news, but I didn’t. It was a relief not to hear of the terrible things going on in the war, day in and day out. I did miss music, though. Especially the Grand Ole Opry. My fellow boarders used to tease me about my love of ‘hillbilly’ music. It would be a long time before I heard ‘Wildwood Flower’ or ‘Great Speckled Bird’ again. I suspected that the Carter Family and Roy Acuff weren’t big in England.
I’d read both of the books I’d brought with me and Olive’s, too. In desperation, I rummaged through the dog-eared paperbacks in the ship’s library, which is how I found myself wrapped in blankets in my bunk deep in Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage. The heroine was a Utah rancher named Jane Withersteen whose livelihood was threatened by a marriage she did not want. Until a lone cowboy named Lassiter came to town. I could not put it down.
I heard light footsteps running down the gangway and then a small hand knocking at my door. I knew it was Corrie Smit.
‘Come in, Corrie,’ I said.
Corrie burst into my berth, her hair flying behind her and her scarf trailing the floor.
‘Mrs Pearlie, Miss Olive says you have to come out on deck! You won’t believe it!’
‘Oh, Corrie, not now,’ I said. ‘I’m reading such a good book. And it’s freezing outside.’
‘You have to come! There’s an iceberg!’
It was an iceberg, all right. Of course, I had never seen one before. Corrie and Alida and I crowded together on the ship’s rail to gawk. It was huge, towering over us. When the sun poked through the clouds, it sparkled like diamonds. One side was steep and vertical – from sheering cleanly off its mother ice field, I assumed. The other side was ragged and battered, as if waves had been beating on it forever. Two spires, as tall as church steeples, rose from the main ice mass. Seabirds, mostly gulls and terns, careened around it, squawking. They’d land on it in groups, socialize, eat a little something, groom themselves, then take off again with beating wings.
I couldn’t get over how enormous it was. ‘It’s like a floating mountain,’ I said to the girls.
‘Iceberg comes from a Dutch word,’ Alida said. ‘Ijsberg. It means ice mountain.’
Tom joined us at the rail. ‘Are we far enough away from it?’ I asked him. ‘Isn’t an iceberg much larger under the surface of the water?’ I was thinking of the Titanic, of course.
‘We’re taking constant soundings,’ he said. ‘We’re at a safe distance. But darn, it’s big! The old-timers on the crew are saying it’s the biggest iceberg they’ve ever seen. I wish I could stay and admire it, but I’ve got to go talk to Sparks. The master wants us to broadcast the berg’s coordinates to the convoy.’ So this giant white mountain was dangerous enough to break radio silence.
Ronan took Tom’s place at the rail. He was wrapped in his tweed coat, wearing a flat cap with a scarf tied over it and his chin. He smelled of pipe tobacco.
‘I just talked to Chief Pitts,’ Ronan said. ‘He measured it somehow from the bridge deck. He says it’s over two hundred and ten feet tall at the tip of the highest spire.’
‘That’s more than twenty stories!’ Taller than most of the buildings in DC.
News of the magnitude of our iceberg spread to the crew members who weren’t on watch, and soon the decks were packed with seaman staring up at the berg with hands shading their eyes. The boat deck, which was a level above the main deck, was crowded too. I noticed Nigel there, leaning over the rail, in a group with his British buddies. The Smits were with me and Ronan at the main deck rail, while Olive stood on a cable spool behind us so she could see over our heads. The master was on the bridge deck with binoculars to his eyes.
I wasn’t surprised not to see Gil or Blanche. Gil was too worldly to be interested in something as mundane as an iceberg. Blanche was avoiding people even more than usual. After her public hissy fit on deck when she’d recognized Nigel, she’d even taken to eating her meals in her cabin.
Our ship and the iceberg drifted apart quickly. The berg was headed south to melt, while we were steaming east to England. The sun vanished behind another bank of gray cloud and the wind whipped up again. The crowd on deck wandered back to their berths or their watch duties. Tom never rejoined us; something must have distracted him.
Mrs Smit touched my arm. ‘Grace should have the coffee down below by now,’ she said. ‘We’re going inside. Want to join us?’
‘I’ll be right behind you,’ I said. ‘I’m going to tell Olive where I’m headed.’
‘I’ll come when I’ve finished my pipe,’ Ronan said.
Olive decided she was ready for a cup of coffee too, so we went inside the door to the head of the stairway to our berths. That was when we heard the screaming. Olive, with her nurse’s training, reacted first, running for the head of the staircase. I was right behind her. We both scrambled down and found the Smit women gathered around someone lying at the bottom. They’d stopped screaming, but Alida and Corrie were sobbing.
Grace lay splayed at the foot of the stairs. Her eyes were open wide, staring at the ceiling. Olive knelt next to her and felt for her pulse, then shook her head. Grace was dead.