Chapter Thirty-Three

19 November 1916

HMHS Britannic

Even at night, the ward is no place for a man to think.

The beds are mostly empty as Britannic is steaming toward Mudros, where—he has been told—it will take on the majority of its patients. The patients who came aboard with Mark in Naples have been situated together to make it easier for the nurses and orderlies, and when he’d been placed among them, Mark found he was surrounded by men for whom sleep is painful. He’d lain on his cot, listening to them whimper and gnash their teeth, plagued by bad dreams. Some mumbled as though in conversation. Others thrashed, fighting enemies left behind on distant shores. Now, in the smaller, more private room, there are only the cries of one lone patient to contend with.

Beside his own.

It’s the exhaustion that has mostly kept him bedbound. He’s mobile, though, capable of walking about with the use of a cane, though Nurse Jennings prefers he not do it alone. He cannot lie still any longer, not when every time he closes his eyes, he fears opening them again, fears seeing that eerily familiar pale face hovering above his. Those strangely vacant, searching eyes. No matter that it is night—night and day have become the same to him anyway. He rises, puts on his drab, military-issue dressing gown, and reaches for his cane, the feel of it glossy and foreign in his hand.

The dining hall is sparsely populated with others who have also given up on sleep, mostly men sitting by themselves in the dark. One man reads under an electric light, the single bulb casting him in a shaft of light. A quartet plays a serious hand of cards at a far table. In the old days, he would’ve itched to join them, but nowadays the sight of a deck of cards turns his stomach.

He chooses a chair and sits in the dark, fingering the top of his cane like he’s nursing an old grievance. Annie Hebbley is still alive. Seeing her has released a flood of memories that he had painstakingly packed away. He had woken up in that hospital in New York after the Titanic’s sinking to be told that he’d lost the only two people in the world who mattered to him: Caroline and Ondine. It had taken months—years, really—to claw his way back from that. At first, he didn’t want to bother. Madness or suicide seemed infinitely easier and less painful than trying to find a way to go on.

It was only after nearly half a year of distance that he could face the Titanic’s list of the dead, checking to see who among the people he’d met on board were no more. He was shocked at how many had perished—especially the wealthy Americans, clinging to some notion of chivalry that seemed to have escaped the British aristocrats who’d managed to find a seat in a lifeboat, like Sir Duff-Gordon and J. Bruce Ismay. Cosmo Duff-Gordon appeared to be in trouble for escaping in one of the lifeboats, and subsequently offering the crewman bribes to row away from the foundering wreck. Serves him right, Mark thought. Better men—Astor, Guggenheim, Stead—were missing and presumed dead. Months and years of inquiries and lawsuits were still to come.

He counted himself among this unholy lot of cowards. He heard the story of his rescue after he’d regained consciousness, how he’d been fished out of the frigid waters adrift, his life belt not yet waterlogged. He’d bobbled close to one of the lifeboats that had been sent off not close to full, and one of the occupants harangued the others into bringing him in. His life since the sinking has been one long nightmare, starting when he woke in a New York City hospital. They’d had to amputate several of his toes, but he was told he was extraordinarily lucky: few men had been pulled out of those frigid waters alive. He’d been unconscious for days. By the time he woke, the entire world had learned about the great tragedy at sea. Titanic survivors were being feted around town, made to give speeches, written up in the newspapers.

He wished he could track down that good Samaritan and tell her she shouldn’t have bothered: there wasn’t a less deserving man on that ship. She should’ve saved her good deed for old man Stead, or somebody who’d done an ounce of good in his life. She’d wasted it on him.

Finding out that he’d lived when his wife and child had died only made it worse.

He had one thing to be grateful for: Lillian’s journal had survived. His hand went to his breast pocket, where he always kept it. Somehow it survived the hours in the sea after the Titanic, as though it was meant to be. As though Lillian’s memory was meant to survive long after everything else fell away. The dried pages of the journal crinkled softly under the press of his hand. There, there.

For a long time, he hadn’t been able to accept the news, especially concerning Ondine. He wanted to believe that she was still alive, that she had been rescued but that the authorities, with no clue to her identity, handed her over to a foundlings’ society or orphanage. She might still be in some cheerless institution, raised without love, like a child in one of Mr. Dickens’s sad stories. Or maybe she had been adopted, raised to believe she was someone else, never told about the Titanic connection, the adoptive parents waiting until she was grown and better equipped to handle the tragic truth. If she were alive, she would be four now. After a time, he started to realize that when he imagined his daughter alive, he pictured her like Lillian, a gorgeous child as radiant as the sun, but with hair dark and reckless, tangled and wild.

He had become an imposter in his own life, in his own skin. His former self had died a long time ago—perhaps before he’d even set foot on the ship. He didn’t know who he’d become. Maybe he was a ghost, and this was all a version of purgatory.

He didn’t bother informing Caroline’s family of their marriage. What would have been the point? When the ship’s manifest was questioned—after all, he and Caroline had been registered as man and wife—Mark swore to Caroline’s grieving father than it was a clerical error, that he’d never met his daughter. Mark wanted no part of Caroline’s fortune and had no interest in ruining a father’s memories of his beloved dead daughter. She belonged to her father; Mark wasn’t sure, in retrospect, that he’d ever really known her at all.

Eventually, Mark stomached the overseas journey so he could come home to London, where he hid in his dark little apartment until the war broke out. It had, strangely, been a kind of relief. The idea of the world ripping itself apart—as if everyone had gone mad. It made him feel less alone. Perhaps the world had always been a cruel, savage place, and now, at least, the truth was out in the open. It no longer needed to be his own private misery, a dark secret eating him from the inside.

Besides, the idea of joining the war effort appealed to him: he’d just as soon die on a battlefield as go slowly mad in his bitterness and solitude. Maybe on the muddy fields of the Balkans or in the hills of Gallipoli, he could reclaim his honor.

In the four years since the Titanic, Mark had managed to whittle his life down to almost nothing: a two-room flat, days spent as a clerk in an accounting house, nights pacing the floor or out walking until he was exhausted and could fall asleep. Sundays were his day of penance, when he would go to various cemeteries and sit before graves that served as substitutes for the watery resting places of Lillian, Caroline, and Ondine.

How did his life come to this, a near hermit, miserable and alone? He thinks back to the happiest time of his life, the months after Ondine’s birth when he and Lillian lived with Caroline. An unconventional life to be sure, and constrained: he could tell no one about it at the time. But he’d trade anything to have those days back again.

He makes his way around the ship, heading back to his hard, narrow cot. His progress is slowed by the cane, especially on the steep stairwells. The sound of his footsteps and the thump of the cane seem disproportionately loud in the still of night, and he feels like a monster in a nightmare chasing down a frightened child. He looks into the patients’ ward, expecting to see Annie. He hasn’t seen her anywhere: not in the halls, not in the wards. She is nowhere to be found, a thought that is hauntingly familiar. He’s been in this very position once.

He pushed her away. He saw the look of confusion and hurt in her eyes. He knew, without understanding why, how intense the knife of betrayal had been. How she seemed to crumple inward at it, at his insistence that they stay apart.

What have you done, Annie?

Could she have thrown herself overboard? Get a hold of yourself, man.

Doesn’t she know that he is cursed, that loving him is a curse? He’s responsible for the deaths of two women. Wonderfully smart and vibrant women whom he did not deserve. They didn’t just die after falling in love with him, either—they died after he’d broken them, made their hearts bleed in pain.

He won’t be responsible for yet another.

It’s clear there will be no going to sleep tonight—not without drink. Back at his cot, he eases open the tiny locker at the foot of his bed for his gentleman’s flask. He rattles it: about a quarter full. The nurse on duty won’t like it if she catches him drinking, though many of the men do it.

He downs swig after swig, not bothering to pause long enough to taste it. He just wants to knock himself out. But it isn’t worry over Annie that makes him so desperate. It’s what he can’t forget or forgive: what he did to Lillian.

And what he did after, too—days after Lillian’s body was found, pulled from the Thames. The memory of it replays in his head, again and again, as he drifts into a thick sleep:

How he got down on his knee and proposed to Caroline.