The Lifeboat: A Novel (20 page)

Some of my emotions must have shown on my face, for Mr. Glover was just reaching out his arm to support me—and I was on the verge of taking it—when Mr. Reichmann materialized in a dim corner of the room, talking to an elegant woman who was rising from her seat. For all that I had tried to picture her face, I had never imagined her to be smiling, but she was smiling now. “Thank you, Mr. Glover,” I said, withdrawing my arm and rewarding his worried look with a smile. “I am quite all right now.” I drew myself up and did my best to ignore the beating of my heart. While I had always imagined a different sort of entrance into society, I reminded myself that I was Mrs. Henry Winter and that this was not the time or place to let my husband down.

THE DAY AFTER
Hardie’s death dawned bright and clear. Mrs. Grant pulled a comb out of her bag and had Hannah fix our hair into braids and knots so it didn’t stream into our faces. The sun shone for two days running, which allowed us to dry the blankets, but made us lose moisture very rapidly through our skin.

There were now twenty-eight occupants in the boat. Mrs. Grant chose new seats for us in order to redistribute our weight, then asked the men to put up the sail, and we steered for England or maybe France. The wind was steady in the west, and soon we were making brisk headway through the water. I was ordered aft, where I was supposed to spell Mr. Nilsson at the rudder, a task at which I proved to be highly ineffective. This was the first time I had occasion to observe Mr. Nilsson close up, and I saw that he was a young man who had only appeared older by virtue of his air of knowledge and authority, which he had now entirely lost. When I asked him to show me how to work the tiller, he looked at me like a frightened rabbit and said only, “You must hold it in the opposite direction from where you want to go,” and he demonstrated by pushing the tiller so that the rudder moved and stirred up a frothy wake. When I told him he was bleeding and offered to wipe away the blood, he drew away from my touch, again with that frightened-rabbit look.

I spent most of my energy merely trying to keep hold of the tiller, but I can’t say I was truly steering; and once, perhaps because of something I did, the rudder popped loose from its fastening pins and we almost lost it to the sea. On several occasions I suffered from a vertigo that might have taken me overboard if Mr. Nilsson had not grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back. This task took all of my physical and mental resolve, so I was mostly unaware of what others in the boat were doing. After some time had passed, Greta switched places with me, and sometime later, we switched back.

Amazingly, very little water came into the boat. We kept the hole in the hull patched as best we could, and, of course, the boat was much lighter now with fewer people in it and those people mere shadows of their former selves. When the wind died, our forward progress stalled, and we lay about the boat without the strength or will to do the first thing to look out for ourselves. Only Mrs. Grant sat upright, glaring out over the horizon for signs of ships or peering over the rail in hopes of seeing a fish in the now dead-calm and translucent water.

Once, we spotted a whale in the distance. “Oh,” said Hannah with a skeletal little laugh, “a whale would last us a good long time.” She closed her eyes and stretched her hands out over the water as she murmured some kind of whale-catching incantation, but of course a whale would have knocked the lot of us into the ocean once and for all. Colonel Marsh called it a leviathan and went on to tell a disjointed story about a book of that name and someone called Thomas Hobbes who believed that people are moved primarily by desire for power and fear of others. He said, “Hobbes believed that everything that happens can be predicted by exact scientific laws and that such laws govern human nature and force people to act selfishly to preserve themselves.”

“I don’t see how that helps us,” Mrs. McCain replied. Then she and everyone else reentered the separate and silent chambers where we spent most of our time. I don’t think anyone thought past the lifeboat. We finally accepted it. It was where we lived.

I alternated between sitting next to Mr. Nilsson, where I clutched at the tiller, and sitting in my usual place next to Mary Ann. There are still gaps in my memory, but while I was waiting for the jury to return its verdict, I tried to fill them in. I think it was two or three days after Hardie’s death that Mary Ann became ill. I must have been ill too, for I remember shivering with her, huddling in against her bony shoulder, falling against her exactly as she fell against me. Every once in a while, someone would be pronounced dead, and those who could summon the strength helped to heave their bodies over the rail. I can’t remember who realized that Mary Ann hadn’t moved in a long time, and later that morning she joined the others who had been consigned to the sea.

At one point, Mr. Nilsson suggested that the bodies of the dead could be used for food, but Mrs. Grant put a stop to such discussions, and no one mentioned it again. I remembered what Mr. Preston had said about survival and the will to live, and I wondered if any of us still possessed it. We spoke very little, and as I think back, I suspect any words I remember saying were mere hallucinations. My tongue was swollen, and without enough moisture, my saliva had gone from being thick and foul-tasting to nonexistent, so that my tongue sat in my mouth like a dead animal, no longer supple and quick, but parched and cracking, like a dried and hairless mouse. My eyes, too, felt sticky and dry, and when I stood in the boat to make my way to the forward blankets or back to the rudder, I seemed to have lost the ability to tell up from down. Bursts of light and inky blots of darkness obscured my vision, as if I were floating in a dark and starry sky. I was often faint, and I fell once into Mrs. McCain’s arms and knocked her over. We lay together in an awkward embrace, too depleted to right ourselves, and we might have stayed that way if Mrs. Grant hadn’t shouted at us to come to our senses.

The boundary between sleep and consciousness had become blurred, and I was never entirely sure what constituted a dream and what reality. The most frightening example of this was when I was struck with the realization that Henry had been in the lifeboat with us for the entire time, but we had all been mistaken about his identity. He had, I realized with mounting horror, put on a ship’s uniform and taken the name of Mr. Hardie in order to get into the lifeboat with me. This meant that the person I had helped to kill was Henry! I pulled myself along the railing until I was sitting next to Hannah. I was trembling with a panic I had never before known as I said, “I don’t think Mr. Hardie was one of the ship’s crew after all.”

“Who was he, then?” she asked me.

“Henry!” I whispered, trying to form the words with my uncooperative tongue. “I think we killed Henry!” I would have cried, but my body had no moisture for tears.

“No, no,” she crooned, putting her rough hand to the side of my face. “We didn’t kill Henry. Henry wasn’t in our boat.” That was when I woke up, if I had been asleep, or when I came to my senses if I had been awake already. I found myself sitting beside Hannah, who had her eyes closed and was slumped against my shoulder, as I was slumped against hers. For the rest of the day, I wandered the halls of my Winter Palace, more like a ghost than an architect.

Later that evening, or maybe the next, the heavens opened up and water poured forth in glassy sheets. It took us several minutes to realize what was happening and nearly half an hour of bumbling to lower the sail enough to divert the water that fell on it into the empty casks the way Hardie had shown us. Our severely weakened state made this all but impossible, but at the end of the downpour, we had drunk our fill to the point of retching and we had a good amount of water in reserve for whatever future remained to us.

During those last days in the lifeboat, the rigid structure of our existence disintegrated entirely. Mrs. Grant did not enforce Mr. Hardie’s roster of duties, and if something needed doing, she did it herself, or Hannah did it, for if she did ask something of one of the rest of us, we were mostly too weak and dispirited to comply. We made no more attempts to sail—it was almost as if Mrs. Grant’s resolve had depended upon Hardie’s opposition for its force.

Either that day or the next one or the one after that, an Icelandic fishing boat appeared on the horizon and picked us up. This point was belabored at the trial: How long after Hardie went overboard were we rescued? How many days did we go without water? I don’t know precisely, but the exercise of creating this journal convinces me that the fishing boat appeared one week after Hardie died. Hannah also claimed to know: “Nine days,” she said under oath. In its summation, the prosecution said it was significant that we disagreed among ourselves and made the case that the time period was shorter, a mere day or two, perhaps, which would have made Hardie’s death “unnecessary, frivolous, and undeniably a criminal act.”

We did not notice until the Icelandic fishermen tried to lift them that two of the Italian women were dead. The third clung to her companions as if they were part of herself, but Mrs. Grant said something to her and she finally let the fishermen drop the stinking corpses over the side. I remember strong hands pulling at me, and I remember my unwillingness to let go of the tiller that had been put in my charge. I remember the overpowering smell of fish from the hold of the fishing boat and the respectful demeanor of the captain and his crew, who, rough and unshaven as they were, seemed to represent the height of chivalry and civilization.

The fishermen were solicitous of our health and gave us the best of their food. We were on the fishing boat for two days, which were spent looking for other lifeboats while we waited for a mail packet that was to take us to Boston. Mr. Nilsson stayed with the fishing boat, saying he would go to Iceland with them and from there make his way to Stockholm. The rest of us were on the second boat for another five days, so by the time we reached Boston, some of our strength had returned to us. I think it hurt our case, because the first impression we made on the authorities was not one of near-starvation. By the time of the trial, the fishermen were back in Iceland, and we had only the written statement of the captain, who had never envisioned that we would be arrested and charged.

When Dr. Cole asked me to tell him about the rescue, it was hard to find words for my feelings on seeing the fishing boat emerge from the mist like a dream. I told him that I would keep the memory in a treasure box for times when life seems bleak, for I experienced a mixture of joy and amazement that I have never felt before or since. He then asked, “Are you hoping for an Icelandic fishing boat to appear on the horizon now that you are facing trial?” and I replied that of course one already had—didn’t he fancy himself its captain?

Isabelle, who was very serious and devout, insisted that we touch not a morsel of our food before giving thanks, so at mealtimes, we spent long minutes bowed over our cooling plates and listening to her enumerate the many things we had to be thankful for. While she thanked the sea, which had buoyed and sustained us even as it threatened us, and then the fish and the birds, which had offered themselves for our use, and finally the people who had died so that we might live, I said my own inward prayer that some miracle might still bring Henry to safety. Others would interrupt to voice their own prayers, and I understood that they, too, were superstitiously making last-ditch bargains on behalf of loved ones while trying not to sound as if they had not been given enough already.

I wondered how long their newfound piety would last, which reminded me of something Mr. Sinclair had once said. “Those who create a deity must also destroy him,” he told me before going on to say that man’s relationship with God replays the life cycle. “When we are babies,” he said, “we need an authoritative figure to guide and take care of us. We ask no questions about that authority and imagine that the small circumference of our family life is the limit of the universe and that what we see before us is what exists everywhere and also that it is all as it should be. As we mature, our horizon expands and we begin to question. This continues until we either throw over our creators—our parents—for good and take their place as the creative force in our own lives or find replacements for them because the terror and responsibility are too great. People go one way or the other, and this accounts for all of the great personal and political divides throughout history.”

I admired the sweeping nature of his statement, how it included all people in every era and admitted no tiresome nuances or exceptions. After our rescue, I saw how all of us had been reduced to helpless children by our ordeal, but at the time of my conversation with Mr. Sinclair, I found myself considering what he said more as it pertained to Miranda and me in the family of our birth than to anything grander or more encompassing. Miranda sought to replace our parents with an external authority, while I was happy to be free of them. When I said this to Mr. Sinclair, he replied: “You have an unusual strength,” and whether I did or not, just hearing him suggest it made me feel stronger than I was, which is a testament to the power of words.

A day later, Mr. Sinclair took up the subject again as if no time at all had passed, even though much had happened in between, including the entire drama of Rebecca Frost’s rescue. “But Grace,” he said, “if you are so much more independent than your sister, how do you explain Henry?” I had always thought of Mr. Sinclair with the highest regard, and up until then, I had also thought of him as my friend and mentor, for everything he had said to me before that point indicated that he harbored only warm feelings for me. Now he seemed to be questioning something, although I wasn’t quite sure what it was.

“I love Henry,” I said. “I am sure that on both sides of your personality divide there is room for love and companionship.” I wanted to emphasize the point, but I am not always quick with words, so it took me a minute before I added: “I do not think that the only way to show courage is to face the world alone.”

“Nor do I. But you must admit that it is only in lonely and challenging circumstances that our true natures show through.”

“And are we being challenged enough for you yet?” I asked somewhat archly, and he replied that indeed we were. I bowed my head to hide my confusion, and when I looked up again, I was startled to see that Hannah was staring directly at me. My skin ran hot and then cold, and I nearly forgot all about Mr. Sinclair, who was looking at me too—not unkindly, I think—but it was Hannah’s gaze that held me; and I stammered some reply about not being as glib with language as he was, but that I appreciated his attempts to bring rigor to my thinking. “We are all being tested, Mr. Sinclair, and I hope that my underlying nature, which I am sure has been completely bared by now, meets with your approval,” but it was not his approval I sought that day.