The Lost Sister by Kathleen McGurl (i can read book club .TXT) 📕

‘Keep it alive for now, is all. What else can I do?’ She looked at Emma with dark, sad eyes, and Emma found she had no response. Keep the baby alive. Keep themselves alive. What else could any of them do now?

The night was bitterly cold. Emma turned up her coat collar and wrapped her scarf around her head. The sea was still flat calm, black, and glassy, and in the distance she could see starlight glinting off an iceberg. Whether it was the one they’d hit or not she didn’t know. It was a beautiful thing to see – beautiful but deadly.

Other lifeboats were dotted around, she could see the glow of cigarette tips and torch beams here and there. All were keeping their distance from the Titanic which was inexorably sinking, slowly but steadily, tilting further and further nose-down. It must be hard to stand on deck by now, she thought, and worried that Martin might slip and fall.

Martin. What would become of him?

‘Sir, was this really the last lifeboat?’ she asked the crew member sitting at the stern of the boat. He’d shipped his oars for now, but was keeping hold of the tiller. She noticed he was wearing only a vest.

‘Yes, miss. The last wooden lifeboat. There are four canvas collapsibles on board. I imagine they’ll be launching those now.’

So there was hope yet, for Martin, and some of the others who’d still been on board. Mary too – Emma had not seen whether she’d got into a lifeboat or not. But – only four collapsibles? She did not know what a collapsible lifeboat would look like, but imagined it would not hold as many as the main wooden lifeboats. And if there were only four, yet still so many men on board … She shook her head. The horror of what was unfolding around her, what was inevitably going to happen when the ship finally sank, was unthinkable.

And now she could only count four decks above the waterline.

All they could do was watch and wait. Somewhere on the horizon there’d been the lights of another ship, she remembered. It must have seen the distress flares, and would be on its way, to take any remaining passengers off the Titanic before she sank. So there was hope, still. Emma scanned the horizon but could not see the lights. Of course, in the lifeboat she was much lower than when she’d spotted the other ship, from the Titanic’s boat deck. The other ship was coming, and would be here soon, no doubt. It had to.

There was a grinding crash and screams, from the now distant Titanic. One of its four funnels had broken off. The ship’s bow was now completely submerged, she looked like she was trying to stand on end. The lights flickered off and back on, and then off for the last time. The Titanic began settling back down in the water, and for one glorious moment Emma thought it would be all right, the ship would stay afloat after all, but no, it was just for a minute, and then there was the sound of tearing metal and the front of the ship once more plunged downwards. This time the stern rose right up, vertical, and seemed to hang there, lit by starlight, for a few seconds before it too plummeted down.

She expected there to be silence once the ship had sunk, but instead the air was filled with a sound that she knew would stay with her for the rest of her life – the sound of hundreds, maybe thousands of people, struggling to stay afloat in the freezing water, screaming, crying, calling for help, calling for their loved ones, pleading, splashing, drowning, dying.

‘We should go back, we could pick up some more people,’ she said. But the crewman nearest her shook his head.

‘We’re full as it is, miss. Any more would swamp the boat and we’ll all go down. Better to save some souls than try to be heroes and lose us all.’

‘But those people …’

He just shook his head once more and looked away.

Those people. All those people. Some of them her friends, her loved ones. Martin.

She caught Violet’s eye. The other woman was crying openly, and clutching the baby tightly to her, as though trying to derive some small crumb of comfort from its little, warm body. Ann too, sitting next to Violet, was weeping, her head in her hands. Others in the boat were sitting quietly, staring back at where Titanic had been, in shock, unable to comprehend what was happening. Titanic was gone. All those people were in the water, and unless help came quickly, how were they going to survive?

Ruby. Martin. Mary. Her thoughts ran from one to the next to the next, round and round. Ruby and Mary might have got themselves onto earlier lifeboats. Martin might be on a collapsible. Or they might not. All she could do was to hope and pray.

‘I wish,’ said a woman near her, ‘that those cries would stop.’

Emma opened her mouth to agree – it was heartbreaking to listen to – and then she realised that the anguished cries only stopped when the person could cry no more. Already the shouts were dying away, and she knew it was not only the shouts that were dying. When at last the cries finally subsided, the silence was far, far harder to bear than the screams had been.

There was a glimmer of light on the eastern horizon. Emma stared at it, trying to work out what it was. Dawn. They’d been in the lifeboat for hours, drifting. For the most part they’d sat quietly, everyone lost in his or her own personal hell. Now and again the baby Violet held whimpered, and she held it tighter and murmured to settle it. There was no drinking water or food on board. No torches. Just them, on the little boat, under the most glorious canopy of stars. How could the night be so