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

IT, she was definitely computer-literate, and she had the whole of the internet at her fingertips. There could be a lot more out there that she could find.

She spent the rest of the day on the Ancestry site, plugging in all the details she knew about her parents, grandparents, great-aunts. She tracked her great-grandparents – George and Amelia Higgins among them – on the nineteenth-century censuses and added those details. The website flagged up matches between her family tree and others. Harriet was intrigued, but there was no time now to click on the links and follow them all up. She looked at the clock and realised it was mid-afternoon. She’d missed lunch, and really she ought to get some housework done today or it’d never be done, and there were potential buyers coming to view the house tomorrow. She snapped her laptop lid closed and stood up stiffly, to get a shift on, as her grandmother used to say.

Chapter 20

Emma, 1912

When the Lapland docked in Southampton there were just a handful of people on the quayside to see the ship arrive. Emma glanced around the cabin she’d called home for the week that it had taken to cross the Atlantic, and said a silent farewell to life at sea. Mary too had decided never to work as a stewardess again. She was returning to her home city of Liverpool.

‘Will we ever see each other again?’ Emma asked her, as the two women disembarked.

‘I’m sure we will. When I’ve got a new job and have some savings, I could come down to Southampton to visit you.’

‘I’d like that,’ Emma said, giving her friend a hug. But privately she knew it was unlikely. Neither of them wanted to be reminded of their terrible ordeal, and Liverpool was such a very long way from Southampton.

As Emma walked down the gang plank clutching her bundle of old clothes, there was a squeal and a shout – Ma and Lily had come to meet the ship. Emma stepped off onto the quayside and dropped her bundle, opening her arms for Lily who was running over to her.

‘Ems, oh Ems. Ma read a list of survivors printed in the newspaper, and it said you were coming back on this boat. But where’s Ruby? What happened? Oh, Ems!’

And then Ma reached them. Emma gazed at her over Lily’s shoulder. Ma’s expression was one of regret and anguish, but with a tiny tinge of hope in her eyes – she was silently asking, Emma realised, if perhaps the newspaper had been wrong and maybe even now Ruby was preparing to disembark from the Lapland and join her family. Emma gave a little shake of her head, and Ma’s eyes filled with tears.

‘Lovey, I am glad you are home safe at last,’ she said, putting a hand on Emma’s shoulder. Emma caught hold of it, her arm still wrapped around Lily, and squeezed, trying to say with a gesture all that she could not put into words.

With Ma holding one arm and Lily the other, she walked home by the familiar route that looked somehow so very different now, in this post-Titanic era. She’d lost so much since she last walked those streets. As they turned into their road, Mrs Williams was outside, standing by her doorstep in her usual position. She shook her head sadly as they approached. ‘It’s true then, is it? All those deaths and your Ruby among them?’

None of the family answered her or even looked her way. It was their private time to grieve.

As they entered the house, which felt different, wrong, quieter without Ruby’s presence, Ma spoke. ‘There’s five other families on this street alone who have lost someone on board that ship. All were men who worked in the boiler room. None of them stood a chance, did they?’

‘No,’ Emma said, ‘they didn’t.’

‘But Ruby, she must have had a chance. The paper said it was women and children first. And you got off it all right …’ Ma’s voice tailed away as she hung up her coat and turned to Emma. This was it. It was time she told them the full story of how she’d searched and searched and in the end had had to hope that Ruby had saved herself on an earlier lifeboat. She resolved, however, not to tell Ma of Ruby’s plans to jump ship in New York, or about Ruby’s pregnancy. Ma need not know that she had lost a grandchild too. Nor would she mention Martin. He was her own, private loss.

‘You did your best,’ Ma said quietly, when Emma finally finished her tale. ‘You couldn’t have done more, I can see that.’ But there was an accusation in her eyes, and Emma could read it all too clearly. She had survived, Ruby had not, yet if Emma had not let Ruby go drinking in the evenings after their duties ended then they’d have been together when the ship struck the iceberg, they could have stayed together and they’d have been on the same lifeboat.

‘I wonder where she was,’ Lily said. ‘You looked everywhere. I suppose we’ll never know. I hope … I hope it was all over quickly for her.’

Emma just shook her head sadly. Lily had grown up, it seemed, since Emma was last at home. She’d been the only daughter at home to help Ma, and of course since news of the Titanic’s sinking reached Southampton she’d have had to support Ma through the agonising days and weeks while they waited for news of survivors.

Ma said no more. She rose from the kitchen table where they’d been sitting, turned her back and busied herself setting a kettle to boil. Only the slight heaving of her shoulders showed she was weeping silently, hiding it from her daughters. Emma wanted to go to her and wrap her arms about her, but felt the gesture would not be welcome. Ma needed to grieve in her own private way, for now.

Instead, she reached across