“DON'T YOU KNOW THAT'S UNLUCKY?”
Floyd Gibbons smothered a smile at that female burst of exasperation from across the smoking lounge. Despite the warning, he continued spinning his forefinger around the inner edges of his glass to create a ringing sound. Hearing the expected harrumph of disgust, he lit his cigarillo on the bartender’s match and lobbed a smirk of triumph at the ravishing American lady in her mid-twenties who, until that moment, had been pointedly ignoring him since their departure from New York a week ago.
At last, he’d found the crack in the ice: She had a fear of testing Fate.
He took another satisfying puff, then finished his drink at the bar of the RMS Laconia and strolled among the tables of the mostly British passengers who were engrossed in their evening games of bridge. He was almost within arm’s reach of his heart’s desire when the dragon guarding the treasure—the young lady’s mother—reappeared from the powder room.
“I cannot abide this tossing!” the plump matriarch cried as she waddled back into the lounge. “I’ve not been able to keep down a meal for days.”
Winking at her daughter, Gibbons reached into his jacket and produced a sliver of ginger root. He drew a pocketknife from his pocket, carved a few shavings of the ginger into his palm, and offered the seasickness remedy to the mother. “Try chewing on these. Works wonders.”
The mother, effusively grateful, nearly swooned from his attention. “Bless you, young man. At least there is one good soul on this ship who cares for the welfare of others.” She shot a glower of accusation at the snooty bridge players who were ignoring her. “These redcoat limeys treat us like colonials. I was promised there would be more Americans.”
“Only six of us lovers of liberty on board, by my count,” he said. “More bread pudding to go around. That’s how I look at it.”
“How refreshing. An optimist.” The mother offered her gloved hand for a formal introduction. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”
He cradled her wattled arm and pressed a kiss to the back of her wrist, drawing the first smile anyone had seen from her during the entire journey. Still bowed, he glanced up at the daughter and made sure she heard him announce his name, laying it on thick with a faux Irish brogue. Having prevailed in their private contest of stare-downs, he served up more blarney. “Intrepid adventurers, you two. Sisters braving the high seas alone on a Cunarder.”
“Oh my, no!” The mother blushed through several layers of rouge. “I am Mary Hoy. And this is not my sister, but my daughter, Elizabeth.”
“Zeus be struck!” Gibbons exclaimed. “And to think I had mistaken you for college lasses off on holiday.”
The mother batted her lashes at him like hummingbird wings and refused to let go of his hand. “We’ve been visiting relatives in Chicago.”
He flashed his empty glass at the bartender and ordered a glass of wine for the daughter. He apologized to the mother, “I’d offer to buy you a drink, as well, young lady, but the spirits don’t mix well with a testy stomach. So, tell me. What draws you two Grail princesses to the land of Merlin?”
“My husband is a physician. We moved to London two years ago to be with our son, who is an agent for the Sullivan machinery company. And you, sir? What brings you across the pond when everyone else seems to be fleeing west?”
He blew a ring of smoke toward the daughter. “The Chicago Tribune is paying me hard currency to get a firsthand look at the fireworks in France.”
“A war correspondent!” the mother exclaimed. “How exciting!” She grasped her daughter’s elbow to bring her closer. “Isn’t that marvelous, Lizbeth?”
Elizabeth Hoy sized him up with all of the warmth of a cop studying a mug shot. “Frankly, I fail to see what is so admirable about sitting out the war pecking away on the keys of a typewriter miles behind the trenches. The British and French governments censor all stories coming from the front anyway, don’t they, Mr. Gibbons? What’s the use of reading your propaganda?”
“Lizbeth!”
He grinned, stoked to renew their battle. “Mrs. Hoy, I’m afraid your daughter doesn’t approve of my profession.”
The mother looked utterly mystified. “I must apologize, Mr. Gibbons. I fear the sea mist has corroded her manners. She is usually quite sociable.”
Elizabeth kept her taunting eyes fixed on her puffing predator. “Mother, I have seen enough of Mr. Gibbons to know he is the type of man who lives to take unnecessary risks. It is neither prudent nor profitable to associate with such vainglorious fortune seekers.”
“What has gotten into you, young lady?”
Gibbons received his refreshed glass of scotch and toasted Elizabeth’s diagnosis of his character. “Now, don’t be too hard on her, Mrs. Hoy. After all, it takes a risk-taker to know one.”
Elizabeth bristled. “Whatever do you mean, sir?”
“Have you considered why so few Americans are with us on this ship?”
“Of course. They’re afraid of being torpedoed by—” Elizabeth blanched, realizing that she had been tricked into proving his argument. She quickly went back on the offensive. “Maybe if you’d stop walking under ladders and spilling salt on board, we’d all have less to worry about.”
Gibbons called over to one of his new acquaintances, a London solicitor who sat lapping an after-dinner brandy. “Mr. Chetham! My beautiful but superstitious friend from Chicago here was wondering what the odds are that we’ll get bonked by one of the Kaiser’s blowfish?”
The well-lubricated solicitor waved off that worry. “I should say no more than four thousand to one. Stiff upper lips, ladies. Britannia firmly rules the lairs of Neptune with an iron fist.”
A waxy diplomat sitting at the next table over wrote an arabesque in the air with his cigar smoke to challenge his fellow countryman’s calculation. “We are carrying war matériel from the States, Chetham. I place it more in the neighborhood of two-fifty to one.”
Before Mrs. Hoy could put a halt to their macabre game of tempting chance, Gibbons called out to the ship’s commander walking through the lounge on his night rounds. “Captain Irvine! The Nelson of the twentieth century! When do we land, matey?”
The captain glared at the American reporter who had been pestering him nonstop during the crossing. “You ask that same bloody question every day, Gibbons. You think my answer is going to change? It’s none of your damn bloody business! For all I know, you could be a Boche spy.”
Several passengers suspended their card games and turned on Gibbons, regarding him anew, this time with suspicion.
“Touchy bloke,” Gibbons whispered to Elizabeth.
“Stop riling him,” she said. “Now you’ve got everybody leering at us.”
Gibbons took that as his cue to further badger the dyspeptic British captain. “Oh, Admiral. Miss Hoy here wishes to lodge a complaint.” Before she could deny that assertion, he announced loudly enough for all to hear, “Her mother is deathly ill from the way you are bobbing this giant Liverpool cork. She tells me the American liners are much smoother.”
The captain’s face ballooned redder than the Union Jack. “Did she now?”
Gibbons kept one eye on Elizabeth’s foot, expecting at any moment to find her heel catapulting toward his shin. In his best Cockney accent, he called out again after the captain, who was now storming toward the exit. “Say, Blackbeard, any chance I could get a look at your sea charts?” When the door slammed in answer, Gibbons shrugged off the rebuff and confided to Elizabeth, “I hope you didn’t have reservations at his table tomorrow tonight.”
She glared at him. “As a matter of fact, we did.”
“No loss. I’ve dined with him twice. He’s a Tory and an insufferable bore.”
She looked ready to explode. “Mr. Gibbons, will you kindly—”
Gibbons grasped her shoulders and jangled her gently, making it appear that, in an act of chivalry, he had caught her after she became unsteady from the roll of the ship. “My dear Miss Hoy, I fear the captain’s bladdered steering has turned you a bit green in the gills. I must get you some fresh air.” He turned to the mother with an appeal. “Would you grant me permission, Mrs. Hoy, to escort your daughter to the promenade to revive her?”
The mother beamed at the matchmaking potential. “Of course. She would be most grateful, wouldn’t you, dear?”
Elizabeth tried to escape Gibbon’s hand at her elbow. “That’s not necessary.”
Mrs. Hoy glanced at the bar clock. “Oh, it’s nearly ten. Past my bedtime.”
Elizabeth seized at the excuse to escape. “I’ll accompany you to our—”
Gibbons walked Mrs. Hoy to the nearest bridge foursome finishing a hand. “Chetham, old chap, would you do your American cousins here a kindness?”
“Of course, Gib.”
“Splendid. I may eventually forgive you and your fellow monarchists for burning down our White House and leaving the Madisons homeless. I’ll consider penning an editorial lobbying against war reparations if you’ll see Mrs. Hoy here to her stateroom. I have offered to reinvigorate Miss Hoy on deck with a few breaths of the same air that your inestimable Captain Cook inhaled on his way to his discoveries of the Pacific.”
Having given the daughter no choice but to surrender to his ploy, Gibbons escorted her up the stairs, keeping a steadying but insistent hand at the small of her back. When they reached the promenade, he removed his coat and placed it around her shoulders. They stood at the railing in silence for several minutes, watching the waves crash against the bow and listening to the dull thrusts of the boiler pistons below. The promenade was dark, for the portholes had been curtained and the night-lights on the gangways had been extinguished to prevent easy spotting by the German subs.
Finally, forced to start the conversation, Elizabeth remarked dryly, “For a man who gets paid by the word, you’ve turned awfully quiet.”
Gibbons felt for his hip flask, but he decided against fortifying his flagging courage. “The thing is, I can rattle off a dictionary when the bullets are flying around my head. But certain situations leave me despairing for description.”
“Such as?”
“Standing next to a woman as smart as she is ravishing.”
With her alluring profile set in sharp relief under the moonlight, Elizabeth gave him a sideways look of mistrust. “You had no problem describing those ladies on that traveling bordello with General Pershing’s Mexican expedition. Weren’t any of them smart and beautiful?”
Gibbons had to recalibrate his estimation of the reconnaissance and ammunition brought to the battle by this bewitching foe. “You saw that story?”
She punished him with a scoring smile. “They do teach girls in Chicago how to read. My father has the Tribune forwarded to our lodging in London. I knew who you were the moment you stepped on board. I read every newspaper report you filed from Mexico.”
“And?”
“You can tell a lot about a man from the way he writes.”
Now he was the one feeling queasy, and not from the roll of the deck. Fact was, he never did much care to be the one interrogated. “What did you think you found out about me from my dispatches?”
“For one thing, you don’t believe in a Higher Power.”
He let out an undignified snort. “Now you’re really reading the tea leaves from the bottom of the cup! I’ve never scratched out a syllable about God.”
She nodded. “Exactly my point. No descriptions of how the poor Mexican people prayed to the Virgin to save them from the war horrors? No crowding into the churches to beg Christ’s protection while their husbands and sons were being slaughtered.”
“I report every story with an objective eye.”
The angle of her gaze slanted in a challenge. “No, you don’t.”
“Now look here, Miss Hoy—”
“You’re telling me you didn’t hear one prayer uttered in Mexico?”
“The Church betrayed those poor Indians. The bishops keep them poor by teaching them that they are helpless, that only a god who whispers to the pope can help them, and that this retooled Jupiter has placed them in miserable poverty and suffering for a greater purpose.”
“So, you’re an atheist. … An atheist and a socialist.”
“I worship at the altar of hard facts. I report what I see and hear, and only what I see and hear.”
“You write what you think you see and hear. But you filter all of it through your heart. You admired, maybe even loved, that horrid man Villa, despite the fact that he killed all of those innocent people.”
He turned away to hide his discomfort at being so expertly exposed. Who did this woman think she was, his editor? “I admired what the man was trying to accomplish, bringing land and a decent life to the peasants. A lot of them put their faith in him, but …”
“But what?”
“Power turned him crazy. It does to all of them, eventually.”
She lifted a hand to his cheek and brought his gaze back to hers. “You must find a faith greater than your belief in the power of reporting the truth, Mr. Gibbons. You will need it for what you will see in France.”
“How can you possibly know what I’ll see over there?”
“I’ve helped out with wounded soldiers in Britain. You have no idea what awaits you. But I will pray for you, even if you won’t pray for your—”
He pressed his lips to hers and kissed her hard.
She surrendered, sinking into his embrace.
Then, she surfaced with a conflicted look. “I must go attend to Mother.”
He refused to release her. “I want to call on you in London.”
She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “I cannot … Please, don’t ask again.”
“Why?”
She looked off into the sea. “My father … ”
“You think I’m not in your social class?”
Stung by that accusation, Elizabeth broke away and ran for the stairwell. At the portal, she turned back. “Promise me you’ll never write of what just happened. I hope you have honor enough to abide my request.”
Too choked up to speak, he could only nod his agreement to her demand. When she had disappeared down the stairs, he walked aimlessly along the promenade, tremoring not from the cold, but the effect she'd had on him. Cast slump-shouldered by her rejection, he finally descended the stairwell and groped his way through the dark corridor. Returning to the card lounge, he heard the clock above the mirror strike ten-thirty, and several Brits stood from their tables, nodding to him as they retired for the night. A few of them lingered on, nursing their drinks and finishing up their bridge hands.
Feeling lower than he had in long time, he found his favorite spot at the bar and signaled for his usual. The scotch was nearly to his lips when the ship pitched sideways violently, sending glasses and bottles flying from the shelves behind the barkeep, whose complexion had suddenly turned ashen. The lounge fell silent—and then—the floor beneath their feet jolted, like an elevator lift slipping its gears.
“We’re hit,” the solicitor Chetham announced from his table, with no more apprehension in his voice than if he had just lost a trick in his bridge game.
Shaken, Gibbons held onto the edge of the bar. He watched the Brits in the lounge casually go about their conversations, as if by sheer refusal to acknowledge the dastardly strike they could turn back the German onslaught.
Mr. Jerome, the diplomat, calmly examined the fan of cards in his hand and then diligently played his lead. Only when he had raked in the cards for another deal did he answer Chetham, “Yes, that’s what we’ve been waiting for.”
Gibbons didn’t know if the sardonic diplomat was referring to the explosion or the new card hand that he had just inspected.
Another Brit, sitting across from the diplomat, opined as he took the next trick, “What a lousy torpedo that one was. It must have been a fizzer.”
Gibbons retrieved his glass at the far end of the bar, reassured by their indifference to the tremor. Shaking his head at his skittishness, he made quick work of what remained of the scotch not spilled. In celebration of their good luck, he ordered another round for everyone in the lounge and raised his glass in a toast. “To John Bull and St. George!”
“Here, here!” shouted a dozen Brits with raised glasses.
The ship lurched again—followed by five blasts of the warning whistle. This time, every man was on his feet and heading for the door. The herd of Brits finally broke into a run for the corridors and clambered up the stairwell. On the landing, the runway lights were out, and the passengers began stumbling into each other.
Bringing up the rear, Gibbons reached into his pocket and found the pen-size flashlight that he always carried. He snapped its bulb on, drawing appreciative murmurs, and led the passengers to the promenade. Outside, on the decks, they found the crewmen rushing to the lifeboats and unraveling the ropes from the davits.
“No worry!” the chief steward shouted. “The little devil hit us astern on the starboard! Missed the engines and dynamos! Evacuation is just precautionary.”
Gibbons followed the Brits who, practiced from their many drills, filed calmly into queues alongside their assigned lifeboats. While waiting for his turn to disembark, he remembered he had left his notebook in his room. His editors would flay his hide if he didn’t file a report of the crossing the very moment he reached France. He split off from the others and hurried back down the stairwell, toward the lower deck. Searching the door numbers with his penlight, he found Stateroom B-19 and darted inside. He retrieved his journal, along with his overcoat, a water bottle, and a special life preserver that the Tribune had given him. He was about to rush back into the darkened corridor when he heard the distant scream of a lady.
A familiar voice.
The Hoys. … He turned back, determined to make certain that Elizabeth and her mother had made it safely to the lifeboats.
A burly crewman blocked his path.
“I need to check on my friends,” he explained, trying to get past.
The crewman refused him entry into the corridor. “They’ll be fine, sir. I must ask you to return to the boats at once.”
“But—”
“Orders, sir.”
Denied, Gibbons reluctantly climbed back up the stairwell. When he reached the promenade deck, the ship began to angle up ominously, stern skyward. The crews struggled to lower the lifeboats and keep them level to allow the passengers to climb in. He kept looking over his shoulder and searching the dimly lit deck for Elizabeth, but there was no sign of daughter or mother. He fought a path through the panicking passengers to Captain Irvine, who was directing the disembarking operation from his perch near the aft.
“The Chicago women!” he shouted at the captain. “I can’t find them!”
The captain stood unmoved with arms set akimbo, as if he were impersonating Lord Nelson at Trafalgar. Barely acknowledging the warning with an upturn of his chin, he advised, “The American ladies load on the other side of the ship, Mr. Gibbons. Now, if you will excuse me, I have more pressing matters to attend than the objects of your dalliances.”
The insistent hands of two crewmen grabbed Gibbons from behind and drove him into a waiting lifeboat. Crowded around him sat several shivering men and a French actress who was threatening to tip the side with her standing and incoherent screaming. The liner groaned and tilted again, sending the hanging lifeboats askew and forcing the crew to untangle the drop ropes. A hiss of steam shot up overhead, and a rocket shot across the stack, illuminating the black sky with a streak of white light.
Were the Germans shooting up flares to gain a bead on their target?
He heard the order to lower away, and all across the length of the liner, lifeboats began jerking and lowering. He looked down, and for the first time saw the angry swells that would soon envelop them. The ropes holding the bow of his boat snagged, and the seaman in charge of its descent begged for a knife. From a bag in the stern, a hatchet was found and passed up.
The seaman cut the rope and sent the lifeboat plunging. Gibbons felt the air sucked from his throat. He surfaced breathless from the drop, drenched and cold from the sea wash, but still clinging to the side. As he and his frightened mates bobbed and dived, the crewman at the bow fought a losing battle to steer them into the wind by using an oar for a rudder. The French actress was now screaming like a banshee, and the men in tuxedos around her were on their knees, praying frantically. A hand clawed desperately at his wrist. He turned and found a half-blind little Jewish man, bereft of his glasses, begging him for help.
All would be lost, he saw, unless someone took charge of this heaving bedlam. He crawled toward the bow, and after several hasty inquiries, discovered that one of the refugees was an old salt named Captain Dear, a retired seaman who had been lodged in steerage. As the other passengers lurched and vomited, this ancient Ahab sat stoically, explaining with his lyrical Scouser accent how this was his third attempt to get home to Liverpool after his fishing schooner had split in half off Nova Scotia two months ago. The scruffy fellow’s record on the high seas did nothing to inspire his confidence, but Gibbons decided that drowning beggars could not be choosers. So, in one breath, he nominated and seconded the codger to start giving orders for navigating the lifeboat. Informed that an experienced helmsman was now at the controls, the passengers calmed from their hysteria enough for them to harbor the hope that they might avoid flailing each other overboard.
After several harrowing minutes, the mood settled from delirium to frigid suffering. He searched the overcast horizon for the other lifeboats. The night had turned overcast, preventing him from seeing more than thirty feet around, but he could hear screams and cries through the mists. He listened for a young female voice above the crashing of the waves and the whistling wind.
“Elizabeth!” he called out repeatedly. “Lizbeth!”
He heard no response.
If the Hoys had been lowered on the far side of the ship, they would likely be hundreds of yards adrift by now. For a moment, he thought of praying for her safety, but what good would that do, a prayer from a sinner and a scoffer too late to the dance?
Then, there came a sucking sound from the distance, and a surge of waves rumbled toward his lifeboat boat and swept over it, dousing all inside with a chilling baptism.
“The old girl’s down for good,” the Irish fisherman at the helm muttered as he looked toward the sinking liner. “We got out of her wake just in the nick.”
Gibbons shook his head at the bitter irony of it all. In preparation for a travel article, he had researched the origin of the liner’s name before leaving New York. The Laconia had been christened after a region in Greece where the ancient Spartans had gained a reputation for speaking in a very concise manner. Now, as the night coldness sank into his bones, he became groggy, and the last thing he remembered thinking was if he drowned, those damned hacks on the editor’s desk back in Chicago would have a field day with the headline:
Wordy Reporter Meets Watery End On Ship Named for Brevity.
THIRTY HOURS LATER, AFTER BEING rescued by a British minesweeper, Gibbons hurried down the docks of Queenstown to question the other survivors brought in to the port. Not finding the Hoys, he threaded past the honking ambulances and kept questioning the dazed passengers who only hours earlier had been engaged in their card games and speaking confidently of British dominance of the seas.
He shouted, “Has anyone seen the ladies from Chicago?”
The crew member who had stopped him from searching the staterooms staggered up in a daze. “I was with them on Boat Number Eight, sir.”
He looked beyond the seaman’s shoulders, toward the ship that had plucked many from the water. “Are they still on the Laburnum?”
“Our lifeboat was smashed during the lowering. The Hoy ladies …”
“Out with it! Where are they?”
“The stern cracked. We tried to bail it out, but the hole in its side was too large to patch. Every swell drove us deeper into the depths.”
“The younger woman—”
The oyster-eyed man was in shock, trembling. “We tried to hold our breaths, but the water was so cold.…just took the strength from you, it did. I begged them to hold on, but they got weaker and weaker. It was the cold, sir. I saw many a man give up sooner. They were brave lasses, they were, but it was so cold. … A wave came over us, and they were washed out. I tried to reach them, but they were … gone.”
“But they wore lifejackets!”
“They just floated away. I tried to reach them, I swear I did. But they just floated away, lifeless like. I believe they were dead before they washed overboard. It was terrible cold out there.”
Gibbons dropped his hands to his shaking knees. Exhausted and dehydrated from the hours of dry heaving, he nearly collapsed. Resolving not to pass out, he stumbled over to one of the ambulance drivers. “Where’s the nearest telegraph office?”
The medic pointed him toward a municipal building perched above the port. “On Ferrell Street. But you need to warm up and get some fluids in you, chap.”
“How many passengers are missing?”
“Thirteen.”
Remembering that it was six hours earlier in Chicago, he staggered up the bluff toward the telegraph office. He still had time to make the evening deadline. As he pushed on up the street, the story took form in his mind. Yes, what he was about to write would be read in every drawing room across the nation. By God, he would make those damn politicians in Washington read it from the floor of the Capitol. The grafs were flowing in his mind now, and he had his lede:
I have serious doubts whether this is a real story. I am not entirely certain that it is not all a dream. I feel that in a few minutes I may wake up back in stateroom B-19 on the promenade deck of the Cunarder Laconia and hear my cockney steward informing me with an abundance of “and sirs” that it is a fine morning.
His account of the sinking would be syndicated around the world. And he would spare the world no detail.
No detail but one.
He had promised Elizabeth that he would never write of the kiss that had caused him, for a brief moment, to wonder if there might be something more in life worth pursuing than headlines.
But no, not for him … not now.
Her eulogy would be just one cold line: The latest information confirms the report of the death of Mrs. Hoy and her daughter.
He vowed to finish the story with the words that would launch the United States into this war. That would be his vengeance against Elizabeth’s God for taking her.