9

AUGUSTA

Thursday, June 14, 1838

11 P.M.

What a lovely two days it had been. The ship’s luxury and comfort were everything Augusta’s brother had promised. Now, having spent a night docked in Charleston, and with the arrival of dozens of new passengers, the ship sailed like a bird toward Baltimore. Men on the lower deck. Women and children above. The children wouldn’t all fit in one cabin and Melody had put the boys with Augusta; Thomas was so attached to his aunt that Melody sent him with Charles to sleep alongside her.

Resting in her berth now, Augusta watched Thomas and her oldest nephew, Charles, with his red curls splayed upon the pillow, asleep in the berths beside her. The sway of the sea felt as sublime as the soft sheets she slept upon.

She rolled onto her side and stared at the boys in the candlelight. Then the flame flickered, beeswax dripping, and a sound, otherworldly, horrific—an explosion—crashed through the night. The silver candlestick crashed to the floor. Augusta shot up from her bed. Her eardrums vibrated and the ship trembled. It wasn’t so much terror that swamped her as confusion.

Heat, as searing as if the sun had fallen onto the ship and was radiating through the hallways and under the doorframes, blew into the room like the breath of a beast. She stood frozen in fear. An eerie silence pervaded—the engine had stopped and the great wheels had stilled.

She glanced around to get her bearings. Their room contained three berths—two built in where she and Thomas slept, and a third rolling berth where Charles slumbered.

With a breath that tasted of smoke, she moved quickly, scrambling. She had no idea what was happening to the ship, but it wasn’t right. She grabbed Thomas and shook Charles. “Charles! Get up. The ship is in trouble. Something’s blown up or caught fire.”

He jolted upright. “Auntie?”

“Something is terribly wrong.”

Darkness saturated the room, and the berth where Charles lay blocked the doorway exit. Augusta held Thomas, who was just waking, snuffling and confused. “Charles, move the berth so we can get out.”

Charles shoved at the bunk, using all his strength, his red hair aflame in the dark. “Auntie, it won’t move. It won’t. We’re trapped.” His voice climbed into a wail.

Augusta stood on top of the bunk, leaned toward the door. “Help us!” she screamed, hoping her voice would reach the captain’s office a mere twenty feet across the galley.

She then placed Thomas, bleary-eyed and whining, on her berth, and with Charles they pushed again at the rolling bed, but it was jammed. Between them they didn’t own enough strength to move it. She turned to the window. Could they crawl out? She vividly imagined the sea filling their room and then their lungs. And with that she froze. If they were to survive, if they were to live and find their way out, she must be rational. She must be logical. Not merely her own life hung in the balance.

Augusta closed her eyes, drew the boys close, one on either side. “We are going to be brave and smart. We need to get out of this room.”

Charles nodded and Thomas whined, pulling at Augusta’s nightgown.

Imagine in your mind’s eye the ship you walked all day with Lilly; see your path out.

Above them stretched the promenade along the entire length of the ship. Two front and back companionways led to the main deck. Charles, Thomas, and she slept in a stateroom in the midsection of the ship, given to them by the captain who said he never slept on board. The ladies’ cabin at the stern and the men’s beneath the ladies’. These facts didn’t so much come to her one at a time but in images and memories of the past day spent wandering.

Twenty feet across the hallway were two passages with closets that stored the china and glassware, and then the captain’s office. Behind the china room, two more staterooms opened on the east side of the ship where her brother, her sister-in-law and the remainder of the family were bunked. Most importantly, outside her stateroom a passageway led to a double stairway where she would exit to the upper deck and promenade. That was the way they must go.

Charles set his feet wide as the boat tilted so steeply starboard that the dark line of the horizon visible through the window slipped lower. “I will save us, Auntie Augusta.” His fourteen-year-old voice, halfway between a man’s and a child’s, cracked.

She took a shaky breath, frightened of not taking another, feeling the pressure to gasp for air. The transom window above the doorway might be big enough to climb out if they could reach it, which they couldn’t. Maybe if she put Charles on her shoulders? With a heave she again shoved her weight against the berth, and prayed to the holy God whom she worshiped in the small church at Stonewall. Where was her brother? Her sister-in-law? Lilly and sweet baby Madeline? Had they already found their way out?

“God help us,” she whispered as she shoved once more against the berth.

With a groan, the ship careened to the port side, and the berth slid with the movement as the door flew open. The bunk’s hard edge crushed her toes as it rolled over, but she felt little, for now a means of escape presented itself.

The sounds that reached her terrified her more than the heat and tilting of the ship. China crashed and shattered in the closet across the hall. Screams from other passengers echoed as if from another world. Augusta grabbed a coat for each child, and they ran into the darkness using her mind’s eye to envision the passageways and the stairwells.

The four lifeboats; she’d seen them. She’d touched them. She knew where they were.

With unusual strength she stumbled blindly through the hallways as she carried Thomas and held Charles tightly by the hand. Other human forms stumbled out and past them.

“Melody!” Augusta hollered across the passageway.

“Here. I’m here.” Melody appeared at Augusta’s side. “You go. Go. Go. I have the others with me.”

“Where is Lilly?”

“I haven’t seen her . . . now go.”

“What is happening?”

“I don’t know. God, I don’t know. Lamar said it was the safest ship in the waters. He said . . .”

They stood in their white nightgowns like ghosts, the air thick with the rancid smell of burning wood and, yes, flesh. Augusta could taste it in the back of her throat. She threw her arms around Melody as the oldest daughter, twelve-year-old Eliza, pulled at her sleeve. “Mama, help me.”

Even in the darkness Augusta saw the forms of Melody’s four other children—Eliza, William, Rebecca and Caroline. Melody clung to Augusta’s arm for one more moment and in a voice as strong as steel said, “We will save them. Follow me.”

They ran forward as a great tearing noise ripped through the hull, the sound of wood separating from itself, its bonds broken. Augusta had heard these sounds one other time in her life—when lightning had struck the great oak outside the plantation house. As it was rent apart, the tree had groaned as the ship was doing now, an animal sound of demise. With that, Eliza fell to the ground and began to crawl. “Stand!” Melody screamed.

Augusta grabbed Eliza’s hand as they all stumbled forward through the dark and smoke to where Augusta knew the stairwell would take them to the promenade deck. A single-minded intent to save herself and the children pulsed within her. There was no room for fear.

Not yet.

She ran as fast as she could with Thomas in her arms and Charles and Eliza by her side. Her white cotton gown flowed around her, her hair loose.

They neared the stairway and spied the muted moonlight above; the ship’s lights were extinguished now. Augusta moved toward that light, yet in the shadows at the edge of the stairwell, something barely seen sent fresh horror and fear surging through her like electricity: bodies scattered, unconscious, burned or injured. But she couldn’t help them—there were six children between her and Melody to save.

An anguished cry tore from her throat. “Oh, Melody, hurry now.”

Augusta took the stairs two at a time.