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On Board the Carpathia
Kate Royston
Danny McSorley was once again perched on the striped satin chair in Eva Trentham’s suite. His shock of blond hair was standing on end, and his jacket was spattered with rainwater. Wolfie, equally as wet and ungroomed, lay at Danny’s feet, wreathed in an odor of wet wool but gazing at Danny with adoring eyes.
Bridie bustled in from the bedroom with a towel for Danny’s hair. “Wipe your head,” she said, “but don’t be wiping that dog.”
Eva Trentham, ensconced in her wheelchair, shook her head at Bridie. “It’s not our towel, Bridie. We don’t have to do the laundry. Let him do what he likes with the towel.” She gave Danny one of her rare smiles. “I’m just glad you took Wolfie for an airing. I don’t understand why the steward refused to walk him.”
“Because it’s pouring with rain and the steward is very busy,” Kate said.
“I think I should register a complaint,” Eva sniffed. “We’re in a first-class suite, and I expect first-class service.”
“Well,” said Bridie, leaning on the back of the wheelchair, “you didn’t pay for the cabin, did you, missus? None of us paid to be on this ship.”
Eva shook her head. “Don’t be snippy with me, Bridie, not if you expect me to employ you in New York.”
Bridie took a step back. “Well, I wasn’t expecting you to—”
“So you would rather be cast up on the shore, penniless with no papers, would you?”
“Well, no, of course not, but I have my son in Chicago.”
“And how are you to get to Chicago? Stay with me while my leg heals, and I’ll see you get there.”
Kate registered the note of pleading in Eva’s voice. The old woman would never say please or make a humble request, but it was obvious that she needed Bridie, and equally obvious that Bridie needed her.
And what about me? Kate thought. She had carefully avoided contact with her employers since she had been hijacked by Eva Trentham. With Titanic survivors crammed into every corner of the ship, avoiding Mrs. van Buren had been easy, but soon they would land in New York, and then what would happen? Would they want to reemploy the governess who had abandoned them? Would they even pay her wages for the few days they had been at sea and she had cared for the children?
She realized with a sinking heart that there was a very real possibility that she would have nowhere to go when she landed. She looked at Eva and wondered if she could continue as her helper. It was not that she liked the comfort of Eva’s suite—she had willingly abandoned that kind of comfort months ago. And it was not that she liked the old lady—well, not really. If she stayed with Eva, it would be out of sheer desperation, and she suspected that where Eva was concerned, a direct request would be rebuffed, not because Eva did not want her but because Eva could never be anything but contrary.
Wolfie gave a low growl, and a moment later, Kate heard a light tapping on the door. As Bridie had returned to the bedroom and Danny was busy drying Wolfie’s wet fur, she crossed to the door herself and pulled it open.
“If it’s the steward, tell him he’s too late,” Eva said, “and I will not be giving him a tip when we reach New York.”
“It’s not the steward,” Kate said, looking at the middle-aged man waiting in the doorway. His tweed suit and vest were a perfect fit, and he did not have the stunned look of a man who had been in a shipwreck. Kate assumed, therefore, that he was one of the Carpathia’s original passengers and not a survivor of the Titanic.
“Mrs. Eva Trentham?” he asked, smiling ingratiatingly from behind a small black mustache.
“No,” said Kate.
The stranger nodded. “Very well. If you are not Mrs. Trentham, are you another survivor of the wreck?”
“No, I’m not.”
The stranger took a step forward. Kate put her shoulder against the door and tried to push him back. “You can’t come in. What do you want?”
“Carlos Hurd of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. My wife and I were on the Carpathia on our way to Naples. Now I am interviewing survivors. I would like to get the full story behind the sinking. The world is waiting for news. Newspaper publishers have already hired boats to carry their reporters out to meet us.”
“Surely not,” Kate said.
Danny looked up from his dog grooming. “It’s true. They have. But I don’t think you should speak to that man. We know all about him in the Marconi room. He’s been trying to send messages to his newspaper and arrange for what he calls a scoop. We don’t let him in anymore.”
Hurd peered past Kate and saw Danny kneeling on the floor beside Wolfie. “Oh, it’s you.”
“Yes, it’s me,” Danny said, rising to his feet, “and we are not sending any more messages for you or your wife. You’ll have to wait like everyone else. This lady asked you to leave, so I suggest you leave before I throw you out.”
Kate felt a sudden surge of elation realizing that she had a protector.
Hurd rummaged in his pocket and produced a small scrap of paper—Kate thought it looked very much like toilet paper—and a stub of pencil. “I’d like to interview Mrs. Trentham,” he said.
Kate stared at the scrap of paper. “If you’re a real newspaperman, why don’t you have a notebook?”
“He doesn’t have any paper,” Danny said. “The captain has made sure that no one will give him paper. He can’t buy it at the gift shop, and we’ve taken the paper out of the writing room. He has nothing left to write on.” He took a step toward Hurd. “Go away. Mrs. Trentham won’t tell you anything.”
Eva’s voice rose angrily from the interior of the suite. “Stop that. Don’t let him leave. Bridie, push me forward. Hurry up. I want to speak to this man. Don’t stand there, Kate. Let him in and find him a real piece of paper. I have a lot to tell him.”
Bridie appeared from the bedroom and began to push Eva toward the door. Hurd pushed past Danny triumphantly. “So, Mrs. Trentham, what can you tell me about the sinking?”
“I can tell you who caused it,” Eva said. “Danny, get out of the way and move that smelly dog. Let Mr. Hurd sit down while I tell him all about Bruce Ismay.”
Hurd took the paper and pencil Kate was holding out to him and sat down, resting the paper on his knee and writing in a form of shorthand Kate had never seen before. She assumed it was the only way a reporter could make a verbatim record of an interview.
“I have been unable to interview Sir Bruce,” Hurd said. “I don’t believe he’s come out of the doctor’s cabin.”
“Of course not,” Eva hissed. “He’s hiding. Wouldn’t you hide if you knew you had been responsible for killing all those people?”
“Responsible?” Hurd queried, lifting his pencil from the page. “I have heard from a number of people that he should not have had a seat in a lifeboat. His behavior was not that of a gentleman, but he only took up one seat, and that does not make him responsible for all those deaths. I have even heard that he sent lifeboats away before they were full, but still—”
“Stuff and nonsense,” Eva snapped. “I’m not talking about seats in lifeboats. I’m talking about driving his ship at full speed into an iceberg.”
“But that was the captain’s responsibility.”
“No, it wasn’t. I heard you say that you are going to scoop all the other papers. If you can tell me how you plan to do that, I will tell you what I know, and I will give you a real scoop.”
Kate dropped to her knees beside Eva’s wheelchair. “Are you sure you should do this? What do you really know that no one else knows?”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Eva responded under her breath. “I told you that I’m going to bring down Ismay, and now I know how to do it. If this newspaper fellow knows how to get his scoop ahead of everyone else, it won’t matter what comes out later. The first story people read will be the story they believe.”
“But you can’t lie,” Kate whispered.
“I can if I want, but it just so happens that I don’t need to. I know how to prove that he was the one behind the ship’s speed. I have witnesses. Now, get out of my way and let me talk to him.”
Kate moved aside reluctantly, and Eva faced the newspaperman. “What’s your plan? How do you intend to be first with the news if the radio operators will not allow you to send messages?”
“We won’t,” Danny confirmed.
Hurd’s mustache lifted as he sneered. “I sent the only message I need to send long before you and your colleagues decided to deny me access and play your silly games with stopping me from having paper to write on. Now I have paper, and now you’ll see what I can do. The New York World is sending out a fast boat, and they’ll be looking for my dispatches, which I intend to throw overboard in a watertight container when I catch sight of them.” He looked at Danny. “We’ll have our scoop with interviews with the survivors, and you can’t stop us.”
“Eva,” Kate said, “please don’t do this. Do you know what it means to ruin a man’s reputation?”
“It won’t be the first time,” Eva replied. “Let me tell Mr. Hurd what I know, and you can listen if you wish. I think you’ll be very interested in what I have to say. You may even change your mind about Sir Bruce Ismay and where the blame lies for all these deaths.”
She turned to Hurd, and Kate watched in fascination as his pencil flew across the paper, making squiggles that could only be read by another newspaperman.
“It was Sunday,” Eva said, “about three thirty, and I was taking my tea on the first-class promenade.” She paused for a moment. “It seems like a lifetime ago,” she said softly.
She shivered and abruptly returned to her normal sharp tone. “It was very cold on the deck, and I sent the steward for blankets. I must say that the crew was not very efficient. They seemed to be only partially trained. I know it was a maiden voyage, but one does expect better. Perhaps that’s why they didn’t ...”
“Didn’t what?” Hurd asked.
“Didn’t know how to launch the lifeboats,” Eva snapped. “Didn’t know how to row. Didn’t know the damned ship was sinking. Didn’t know anything.”
Hurd’s writing flowed across the paper, taking down Eva’s complaints. As he wrote, he licked his lips. He’s enjoying this, Kate thought. He’s getting his scoop.
“I saw some passengers walking toward me,” Eva said. “I knew at once that the ladies were Mrs. Arthur Ryerson and Mrs. John Thayer, and of course, the Thayer boy was with them. I think his name is Jack. I’ve seen him since we came on board the Carpathia, so I know that he was rescued along with his mother. His father, of course, was not rescued.”
She paused again. Kate thought that Eva was not finding it easy to tell this story. For all her irritable sharpness, she was not without emotion.
“They were not alone,” she continued. “They had Sir Bruce Ismay with them. I wouldn’t normally give that man the time of day, but I thought I should say something to Mrs. Ryerson. It was the first time I had seen her outside her cabin. She had been shut away ever since we left Cherbourg. The family suffered a loss, you know. A son killed in an automobile accident. I thought I should offer sympathy.
“They reached me before I could even get myself out of the deck chair, and Mrs. Ryerson was just chattering away. She’s like that. She’s a chatterer. I can’t stand women who chatter. She started to tell me that we were in the vicinity of icebergs. Well, I could have told her that myself. Why else would it be so cold?
“Before I could stop him, Ismay started waving papers in my face and telling me what a wonderful thing the Marconi was and how the captain had personally shown him these ice warnings and how there was no danger of us being in the ice, because he now knew where the ice was. You would think he was personally steering the ship. He said they were going to fire up a couple more boilers, and they would have us in New York in record time. When Mrs. Ryerson continued to fuss about the ice, Ismay pointed up at the crow’s nest and said they had doubled the lookout and there was absolutely no danger.”
Eva was silent for a moment, and her sharp, bright eyes were suddenly shadowed. “The captain wasn’t in charge of the ship,” she said. “Ismay was.”
Hurd made a final notation on the paper. “May I keep the pencil?” he asked. “I’m afraid we only have one other, and my wife is using it.”
Eva nodded enthusiastically. “Certainly you may if it will help you speed your message to your editor. Are you sure your container will float?”
Hurd grinned triumphantly. “Champagne corks,” he said. “No one has stopped me from collecting champagne corks. I’ll attach them to the box, and it will float. I believe we are already in sight of land. It won’t be long now, and even with this rain and wind, I have no doubt my editor will secure a boat to meet us.”
“It’s going to be chaos,” Danny said.
When Kate looked at him quizzically, he gave her a disbelieving smile. “You don’t know, do you?”
“Know what?”
“Thousands and thousands of people are waiting for us. We are the biggest story since the assassination of President McKinley, or maybe even the assassination of Lincoln.”
“Well, it’s a tragedy,” Kate said, “but it’s not like a presidential assassination.”
Eva leaned forward in her chair. “You’re wrong, Kate. Some of the men who died had more money and more power than any president.” She made a shooing gesture with her hand to send Hurd on his way. “Write it up, Mr. Hurd, and make sure you have enough champagne corks.”
When the door closed behind Hurd, Kate saw a change of expression on Eva’s face: triumph replaced for just a moment by a look of utter despair.
Bridie leaned down from her position behind the wheelchair and rested a hand on Eva’s shoulder. “There, there,” she said soothingly. “Don’t fret yourself. Just do what you can for those who can’t do for themselves. It’s the only way through grief.”
Anger flickered across Eva’s face. She pulled away from Bridie’s comforting hand and gave Kate a self-satisfied smile. “Ismay is going to regret the day he told the captain to light up another boiler.”