Chapter Eight

Caroline sat at the dressing table in her cabin after dinner that night, keeping her gaze strictly focused on her reflection in the mirror as she brushed her soft, golden-brown hair. One hundred brush strokes, like her mother once taught her. Her hand hardly trembled at all.

“I’ve never spent a less pleasant evening in my life.” Mark tamped his pipe tobacco in fierce, sharp jabs. “If this is the way your people behave”—Americans, he meant—“then I have sincere reservations about what to expect in New York.”

When he wanted to be charming, Mark could fill a room with his voice, his ease. When he wanted to be sour, however, he could curdle the blood in her veins. It was as if the suggestion of the séance, the childishness of it, had made him childish and pouty. “It was suggested in fun. They didn’t mean to hurt the old man’s feelings or to tease him. Besides, these aren’t ‘my’ people at all.”

The trouble had all begun with that old gossip Lady Duff-Gordon, showing off her new young hero, the boxer who’d apparently saved the boy from nearly going overboard. W. T. Stead had called the incident—What was it he’d said? “The call of the void.” The old man believed in ghosts—he practically said so himself over dinner, waxing on about the spirit world and how it had been beckoning the Astors’ little servant boy, raising the idea of a séance.

“The way they mocked poor William Stead,” Mark huffed. “The man is practically an institution in England. They had no respect for him at all.”

“Let it go, Mark,” she said with a sigh. “They all agreed to participate, anyway, after Madeleine Astor insisted. I’m sure she simply can’t think of any other form of postdinner entertainment. And you must admit you’re curious, aren’t you?”

There was more she could say, wasn’t there? The weight and power of Lillian everywhere in their thoughts. He had to wonder, as she did. She tried not to admit how often she felt that woman’s presence, looking over her shoulder. Would she follow them until the bitter end?

“It’s disrespectful. A sick indulgence. I beg you, Caroline: let the dead rest in peace.”

Caroline’s hands shook as she smoothed her dress, and she refused to look Mark in the eye. Let the dead rest in peace. And yet he still carried Lillian’s diary like some kind of dirty secret, kept it in his breast pocket close to his heart. As if Caroline didn’t know. As if she didn’t know everything—the horrible, shaking breath and piercing cry of his nightmares, the same ones, she was sure, that wove stealthily into her own on the nights she slept at all.

As for Stead, she heard he had spent time in prison for some ghastly offense, something to do with prostitution, though Caroline wasn’t sure she had the entire story. She’d wanted to tell Mark that she had a bad feeling about Stead—it made her uncomfortable to travel with a newspaper man; they were always asking questions—but she held her tongue for now. You never knew anymore when a single word might spark a flame in Mark.

She was at thirty-seven strokes when the loud knock at the door startled her. She stood immediately, concerned about waking the baby. Mark gave her a quizzical look but said nothing, instead moving ahead of her to the door, as if to protect her from whoever was on the other side. Sometimes it made her want to cry, this playacting. As if she could still be protected. As if the sickness and the horror hadn’t touched them both.

But it was only the stewardess, that pretty Miss Hebbley. It took Caroline a minute to understand why she stood in the doorway with a tray: it was the warmed milk they had requested be delivered at this hour every evening.

“Come in, please.” Mark stood aside to let her by. That exact moment, Ondine chose to wake, shattering the quiet with a razor-sharp cry.

“The milk—would you like me to pour it straight into the bottle?” Miss Hebbley asked.

“Would you?” As the stewardess busied herself with the pot of milk and slender glass bottle, Caroline couldn’t help but think that Miss Hebbley’s small hands seemed made for such fussy, careful work. With their constant tremble, she didn’t trust her own hands enough to pour—especially not in front of Mark.

Meanwhile, Ondine continued to wail—the plaintive notes repetitive as a metronome. Demanding, accusatory.

“Is there anything else I can do for you?” the stewardess asked. Her eyes went to the crying baby, as if she was wondering why Caroline hadn’t yet managed to soothe her.

“No, thank you.” The words came out more curtly than Caroline intended, but her frustration with Mark was morphing into a cloud of greater annoyance—at her husband’s recalcitrance, at the baby, at the noise itself, inhabiting their small cabin like an additional presence.

She thought the medicine was supposed to help. This new drug barely took the edge off and made her thoughts fly faster through her mind instead of going still and quiet, as she’d wanted. She would go to the ship’s surgeon if she had to and demand a prescription for laudanum.

After the stewardess had left, Mark turned on his wife. “That was uncalled for, don’t you think? She was only trying to help.”

“I don’t like the way she was looking at Ondine.” The thought came to her as she said it and crystalized into truth.

Caroline let Mark take the baby. The wailing, while it didn’t stop, ebbed in intensity, like a violent storm wearing itself out. She watched Mark adjust Ondine’s swaddle cloths with a degree of expertise that baffled her. She sighed. It wasn’t Mark’s fault that he was a natural with the baby. That he’d loved someone else before her. These things didn’t mean he loved her any less. If anything, he had to love her more, didn’t he? After all they’d been through together.

Did that make her a terrible person for the way she felt—itchy, entrapped in a web of her own making?

And then there was the baby. No matter how much help she received, she couldn’t avoid the fact that motherhood simply wore her out. There was always this gnawing on the inside for a freedom she would never have again.

But the innocence and freedom of her past had died a gasping, strangling death, now hadn’t they?

Caroline reached for her shawl, pinning it closed around her shoulders with the help of her favorite brooch. One of the few gifts Mark had given to her. Both of them knew who it had belonged to before. . . .

“Are you sure you aren’t interested in coming?” she asked, knowing his stance on the séance had not changed.

“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Mark said, not looking up. He didn’t have to. His words were like thorns. She knew better than to touch them.

By now Ondine had calmed and latched on to the bottle, Mark holding it at a gentle angle as she drank. He nodded at Caroline but stayed focused on the baby. His thorns had become a fortress of briars surrounding Ondine. Keeping Caroline out. She felt a pang of envy—though whether it was for that safety or that intimacy or both, she couldn’t say.

Why wasn’t the medicine working? It was supposed to soothe her. It was too little, that was the problem. A pinch of powder, mixed in a thimble of water.

She touched the brooch, the smooth shape of the dangling heart, so close to her own.

She took the long way round the lower deck and up through a private staircase, presumably reserved for the servants. She was just at the top of the stairs when the Astors’ servant boy, Teddy, slipped past her in a blur. Or maybe he’d not slipped by but stopped to say something to her in his secretive way. Had she, in fact, squatted down to his level to find out what he wanted? What is it, Teddy? Do you have a secret for me? But her head had been hammering, the passageway so narrow and dark, and she’d been unable to focus on what he was saying, desperate for the medicine to effect its magic, wanting only now to escape into the air and the night.

By the time she stepped out onto the promenade, thankfully, the dose began to do its work. She would take a breath of air before meeting everyone for the séance in Stead’s room. Of course she was going to attend, despite her husband’s misgivings and the apparent frivolity of it all. How could she not?

Besides, it wasn’t just the call of darkness, the curiosity, the constant tremor of something following her from beyond the grave that made her seek out the gathering. She didn’t want to admit how much she had enjoyed the company at dinner tonight. She hated to think that she simply wanted an excuse to leave her rooms, and her husband and child, behind.

It was much less crowded on the open-air deck at this hour than it had been earlier. A scattering of young couples, their murmurs drifting out over the water, strolled arm in arm or leaned on the railing to look at the stars—the great canopy of velvet blackness, punctuated by pinpoints of glittering light. Caroline sucked in a soft breath. The night sky was much more beautiful away from the city, and it made her want to cry, though no tears would come, she knew.

Her mother always said that beauty existed to make us feel life’s perfect marriage of suffering and joy.

It was something her late husband, Henry, had never appreciated. That was one of the things that had drawn her initially to Mark: He understood. He was moved and awed by little instances of beauty bound with sadness: a torn page swept up in a sudden, swirling wind; a pigeon fluttering its wings as it bathed in an oil-streaked puddle; a crumbling ruin overgrown with swaying nettles; a stranger struggling to tamp down some secret sorrow. Henry had always called her a hopeless romantic, but Mark had seen it was something more than that.

Lillian had, too. Caroline understood Mark’s love for Lillian. In many essential ways, she had loved Lillian just as fiercely. She had been complex, fiery, so full of seeking. Caroline had been drawn to her immediately, had envied the intensity of her and of Mark’s passion for her. Had wanted—no, needed—to be part of that in some small way.

Lillian had been her friend first; that was how Caroline had met Mark. Lillian might’ve only been a seamstress—from a good family, but one that had fallen in society over the generations—and yet the two of them had become as close as sisters.

For a time, anyway.

A cold wind wriggled up her sleeve—she shivered. Her shawl had come loose about her shoulders.

The air out here was ghostly, craving something of her. Something she would never let herself give.

The truth.

She made her way to the railing and briskly rubbed her arms beneath her light shawl. The fresh-steamed evening dress she wore tonight was just one of the many she had commissioned while abroad, this one a shade of pale blue-purple that had made her think of the hydrangea blossoms that would burst up cloud-like in front of her family’s vacation home in Nantucket.

Now, the choice of dress seemed naive—she hadn’t considered the night winds. The torrent of dark memories.

They’d left their second stop of the day, in Cherbourg, France, sometime after dinner, and would be arriving tomorrow in Queenstown, Ireland. But for now, they were too far from land to make out its shape or the halo of its lights.

Dark ocean lapped on all sides.

She rubbed her arms, half thrilled and half unmoored by the idea of all that distance, all that darkness, everywhere she looked. There was something almost erotic about it, the incomprehensible massiveness of the world and one’s small part within it.

Maybe they’d truly escaped the horror they’d left behind.

Maybe it was all new from here. A fresh start.

Tobacco smoke leaked from the portholes of the men’s smoking room. There were eight thousand cigars available for the first-class male passengers’ enjoyment, a steward had told Caroline proudly, as though she cared. It smelled as though all eight thousand were being smoked tonight. Still, it made Caroline feel guilty. Mark would probably enjoy the company of other men over brandy and tobacco, rather than being left to mind the baby while she was out taking a turn in the night air. She shouldn’t have stormed out. She shouldn’t treat Ondine like a toy, to be handed to someone else when she got bored. She wanted, desperately, for Mark to be happy.

But the truth came to Caroline with a shock of clarity as she moved past an older couple murmuring softly to each other: Mark wasn’t happy.

And neither was she.

The marriage had been so hasty. It had all been theoretical before, a frantic mess of plans, urgent whispers, and last-minute purchases. Now they were encased in a swirling mass of secrets, bound together and making their way inevitably toward distant shores. There was no turning back.

---

It was Benjamin Guggenheim who opened Stead’s door when Caroline knocked. She recognized him from dinner and was relieved to see him again.

The smile he gave her told her that he was pleased to see her, too. He was cloaked in tobacco smoke, a half-finished cigar smoldering in his hand.

“Are you alone, Mrs. Fletcher?”

She recognized the look in his eyes: hesitantly flirtatious. He was married, with children around her age, if she was correctly remembering a newspaper story she’d once read, but he was known to be sailing with a mistress, a French singer. Caroline wasn’t naive; she knew such arrangements were common, even if rarely conducted this openly. And yet Guggenheim had impressed her at their dinner conversation and didn’t seem the kind of man who was interested in women only as conquests.

Feeling her face flush with the thought, Caroline surveyed William Stead’s cabin. He had transformed his stateroom. Caroline imagined it had started out exactly like hers: a square box paneled in wood, with a table and four narrow chairs, cheerless electric sconces on the walls. But here, the lights had been turned off and a pair of elegant silver candelabra brought in, the long tapers topped with wavering flames. Additional chairs formed a ring around the table, which was now graced with a flowing white tablecloth. The porthole had been unlatched and left slightly ajar. Sounds from the ship drifted in through the open window. Muffled talking and laughter. Somehow, this Mr. Stead had managed to conjure up the right atmosphere; well, Guggenheim had said the Englishman was a noted occultist. Maybe he kept all the accoutrements with him in a box, like a traveling salesman.

Caroline felt a tremor of nerves run through her, despite the powder.

Madeleine Astor had evidently been able to persuade her friends to join them. Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff-Gordon were already seated at the table, Lady Duff-Gordon with a puckish smile on her face. She doesn’t expect anything to come of this. To her, it’s a lark.

The Astors were already at the table. John Jacob gave her a nod, but he looked miserable. Caroline couldn’t tell if he might be there only to indulge his wife. Madeleine was beside him, her chin jutted proudly. Her face was done up with all the fashionable paints—dark arched brows, and pouty reddened lips—yet the sweet roundness of her face made her look more like a schoolgirl than a society lady. She was so young. And pregnant: the swell was evident, even under the skirts of her cleverly designed evening dress.

No sign of the boxer Mr. Bowen. Undoubtedly, no one had thought to invite him even though he was the one who’d saved the boy. For a moment, she thought of what Mark would say: that to these rich people, anyone who wasn’t in their class was invisible.

“Can I help you to a seat?” Guggenheim asked her, shuffling her forward toward the table, his hand resting on the small of her back. “Occultism is a fad among my friends,” he muttered, “but I must admit that I find it a bore.” He whispered that last part, his warm breath tickling her ear.

“You don’t believe in life after death?” It was a true question; Caroline felt herself hope he’d have some superior knowledge of the truth. Could we ever escape?

He held out her chair. “I’m not opposed to the concept, mind you, but no one has proved it to my satisfaction. Yet, anyway.” He released a wobbly smoke ring into the air and a mischievous smile crept over his lips. “But if we’re trying to find out what was responsible for that little boy’s spell earlier . . . my money would be on sirens. I’ve always been partial to the idea of them. You know, those sea nymphs who bewitch men with their song until they crash their ships onto the rocks and die.” He laughed and shook his head. “I’m not sure what such a fascination says about me.”

“It means you’re a romantic.”

“That would be the kindest interpretation, Mrs. Fletcher. I’m not sure everyone would agree with you, however.” He grinned and she felt briefly dazzled by the brightness of his teeth.

As Stead pulled items from an open trunk, the various conversations at the table died down. First, a bowl decorated with a beautiful Oriental motif. He put something in the bowl and then struck a match. A thin trail of smoke lifted toward the ceiling and a musky smell filled the room.

“Incense, William?” Lady Duff-Gordon asked.

“A special blend I picked up in the Himalayas. Used by the monks when they wish to communicate with their dead.”

Next came a large, shallow dish that Stead placed in the center of the table. The interior of the bowl was luminous, as though lined with mother-of-pearl. Stead filled the dish with water from his ewer. “Have you seen a scrying bowl before?”

“I should say not,” Cosmo Duff-Gordon replied, presumably speaking for everyone.

Stead dipped a finger into the water. “If we are lucky, the spirits will show themselves there. Or we will be allowed to see the spirit world through this surface.”

“Like a portal?” Guggenheim asked.

“Exactly, sir.” Stead beamed.

Last came a plate. It held a small, crusty loaf of bread.

“Did that come from our dinner table?” John Astor guffawed.

“It’s for the dead. Spirits of the dead come to us looking for things. Sustenance,” Stead said, gesturing to the bread. “Light, warmth.” He gestured to the candles. “Everything on this table is here for a reason.”

“I see,” Lady Duff-Gordon said, arching an eyebrow.

Caroline, too, had become restless. Cynical. What were they all pretending?

“There’s one more thing I must tell you.” Stead looked to each one in turn as he spoke. “We don’t know the provenance of the spirit that made contact with the Astors’ servant today. We don’t know if it is someone related to their servant boy. It may be someone else entirely—perhaps even someone looking to make contact with one of you. In all likelihood, if we are contacted by a ghost, he or she will be known to someone in the room. Have any of you lost someone close to you recently?”

Once again, Caroline shivered. It was a silly question, though: everyone had, not just her. Disease, pestilence, accident, war: death was never very far away. Still, trepidation seemed to flare briefly on everyone’s faces.

“Very good. Our dear departed, the beloved dead,” Stead said. “Remember those names.”

The room suddenly felt small and close. Even with the porthole open, there was not enough air, and what little they had was thick with incense and the salty perfume of the sea.

Stead looked around the table. “Let us take our places.” It seemed much more solemn once they were all sitting, faces bathed in the flickering candlelight. “Now we hold hands,” Stead said. “But, ladies, I must ask you to remove your gloves. The contact must be skin to skin.”

Caroline undid the rows of tiny buttons at her wrists before tugging off her gloves. She wriggled her fingers; her hands looked naked. When she pressed her fingers into Guggenheim’s warm palm, she felt a frisson of electricity pass between them. It wasn’t often she felt a strange man’s bare flesh.

“Silence, please.” The table settled. Stead closed his eyes, solemn as a priest. “We are gathered tonight to commune with the dead. Today, a boy on this ship was contacted by a spirit. The people now gathered wish to understand what lured that boy to near death. If that spirit is present, we ask that you make yourself known. . . .”

Caroline peered through narrowed eyes. The flames stood with only the faintest flicker; the water in the scrying bowl lapped gently in time with the movement of the ship.

Stead tried again. “We wish to speak to any spirits now present. We beg you to make yourself known to us. . . .”

Sounds from elsewhere on the ship started to worm their way into her consciousness: a woman’s laughter; snatches of violin, high and sweet.

“Please, make yourself known. We are believers. We invite you to come among us.” Strain was creeping into Stead’s voice.

Madeleine Astor coughed. “Must there be so much smoke? I don’t know that I can stand this much longer—” Not in my condition, she meant.

“My dear, this was all your idea,” John Astor said in a voice that Caroline couldn’t quite read. Was it reproachful or teasing?

“Yes, it was,” Astor’s wife replied testily, fixing him with a glare. “I take it very seriously and I wish you would, too—”

“Quiet, please.” Stead cleared his throat. “We encourage any spirit here in this room tonight to reach out to us.”

Caroline was almost relieved when nothing changed.

Then she noticed that the room had grown colder.

Sea air, because the porthole is open. It’s nothing.

The faint trails of smoke rising from the candles seemed to be swirling together, chasing one another like children around a maypole.

Again, it’s the porthole. Driving the air into some kind of vortex. A simple explanation.

“There’s a spirit in the room with us,” Stead said, as excited as a boy on Christmas morning. “Spirit, give us another sign. Confirm your intention. If you are here with us, knock on the table. . . .”

The table trembled beneath Caroline’s hands, skittering like water thrown into a pan of hot oil. She had to clench her teeth to keep them from chattering.

Madeleine whimpered. “Is it Teddy’s parents? Please let it be Teddy’s parents.”

The candle’s flames reared high, suddenly, illuminating everyone’s face. A low moan shuddered through the room.

It’s only the wind whistling through the porthole. That’s it.

“Again! Speak! Tell us your name!” Stead prompted. “Are you known to one of us? Why have you contacted us? Why?”

The surface of the water in the scrying bowl went choppy, like a storm at sea, then splashed from the scrying bowl onto the white tablecloth. It spread in gray patches.

“Speak, spirit! What are you trying to tell us?” Stead was nearly shouting now, his hands gripping his partners’ so tightly they had gone white. “To whom would you speak?”

The door flew open, suddenly. Electric light fell like a dagger from the alleyway.

Anne Hebbley was in the doorway, drawn back like a frightened cat. “Good God, what is going on?”

Wind swept through the room, lashing the flames. Then—they were out, twisted plumes of smoke rising from the wicks. They were plunged into darkness, the only light spilling in from around Anne Hebbley’s form, silhouetting her.

Hebbley curtsied and Caroline’s eyes began to adapt to the darkness. “Begging your pardon, but Mrs. Astor’s lady’s maid, Miss Bidois, sent me to find Mrs. Astor and Mr. Guggenheim. I do apologize for the interruption, sir, but she asks if you might bring your physician to the Astors’ stateroom right away.”

The Astors exchanged looks, Madeleine’s hand going reflexively to her belly. Astor narrowed his eyes as though suspecting someone was playing a trick on him. “I don’t understand. . . . Surely whatever the problem, our presence is not necessary. Tell Miss Bidois she must handle it on her own—”

“It’s the boy,” Hebbley blurted out. Stead flicked on the lights at last, and there was terror in Miss Hebbley’s eyes, Caroline realized. “Miss Bidois said Teddy’s having a seizure. She’s afraid he might—”

There was a fluttering of white chiffon as Madeleine Astor leapt up from the table, followed by her husband as they dashed from the room.

Their cabin was only a few doors down, and yet Caroline couldn’t make herself follow, feeling fixed to her chair and unable to move.

Far away, a door opened. The sound of concerned murmurs leaked into the alleyway—a dream’s distance away. The rest of the Astors’ servants? The door must’ve been left open as Caroline heard Madeleine’s voice, then—the timbre if not her actual words, muddled as if through thick, undulating water. For a single moment, everything was quiet and still.

And then there was a scream. Madeleine Astor’s. A scream of such terror and sadness that Caroline had no doubt as to what had happened, even before she’d followed the sound, in an out-of-body rush, to the room and seen it for herself.

The little servant boy she’d seen running around the promenade earlier, no bigger than eight or nine, lay still on the floor, the coverlet from the Astors’ four-poster bed yanked partway onto the ground beside him, as though he’d tried to clutch at it to pull himself up but failed. A physician had two fingers to the boy’s neck and was staring at the rest of them with a distant look in his eyes. Out of habit, Caroline reached for her brooch but found it was gone. Instead, she did all she could think to do: she went to Madeleine and held her close. After all, the girl was only eighteen—practically a child, herself.