And the Band Played On (13 page)

Andrew was also sick to death of well-meaning friends and acquaintances telling him how proud he should be of his hero son. Andrew did not want a hero son, even if it did make a good headline. He wanted a son who was alive. Why couldn’t people understand that?

Several friends had referred in letters of sympathy to ‘Jock’s fine example’, a ridiculous cliché, thought Andrew, given that Jock’s example involved standing on the deck of a sinking ship in the middle of the North Atlantic playing a violin. Just how many people would aspire to that? It gave him no comfort to know that at least 100 people were keeping him and the children ‘in their thoughts’. For this reason Andrew had stopped opening letters several days ago, but he scrutinised envelopes looking for one with a Liverpool postmark which might contain information about Jock from the White Star Line.

The first post in George Street was always delivered promptly at 8 a.m. and was one of the few events in Dumfries that you could set your watch by. Andrew’s strict adherence to routine dictated that he would be in the dining room at this time, eating breakfast with his wife Alice, his son Andrew and daughter Kate. Each day brought new disappointment as Alice, having heard the clatter of the letter box, brought back to the breakfast table a bundle of ten or twelve letters, none of them from Liverpool. Today there were three hand-written white envelopes with black borders, one hand-written brown envelope immediately recognisable as a circular from the Dumfries Music Society, and a typewritten envelope with a Liverpool postmark.

Andrew snatched the envelope from Alice and tore it open. The letter was not, as he had hoped, from the White Star Line. It was from C. W. & F. N. Black and it said:

Andrew read the letter and the accompanying statement three times, with growing disbelief. At first he thought it must be a clerical error, or possibly a practical joke in the worst possible taste. Without saying anything, Andrew passed the letter to Alice, who read it and burst into tears.

The statement explained that Jock was to have been paid £4 for the return voyage on the
Titanic
. But as the ship had sunk before even reaching New York, Blacks had terminated his contract from 2.20 a.m. on 15 April – the moment the band could no longer play on. Jock’s wages, reduced pro rata, were now insufficient to meet the expenses that Blacks had incurred on his behalf through the outfitters Rayner’s. These included the provision of White Star lapel insignias for his bandsman’s tunic, sewing White Star buttons on his uniform (one shilling) and Jock’s sheet music, which was now floating somewhere in the North Atlantic. The total Andrew was being asked to pay came to 14s 7d, less than £1 but a sum with approximately £40 of buying power in today’s currency. There was no accompanying letter of regret, no word of sympathy.

Andrew felt dizzy. He thought for a moment that he was going to faint and quickly sat down to catch his breath. He felt freezing cold and wondered if he might be having a heart attack. He heard Alice say through her tears, ‘How could they, Andrew? How could they?’

Suddenly Andrew found himself living in a world where people could send your son to his death and then invoice you for his buttons lying at the bottom of the ocean. He would have his revenge and it didn’t matter who would pay for this.

It was bad luck, as well as unfortunate timing, that Mary Costin chose this particular moment to break the news to Andrew Hume that she was expecting Jock’s baby. She had judged that 8.45 a.m. would be the best time to arrive, catching him between breakfast and his first lesson of the day at 9 a.m., thus preventing a scene in front of one of his pupils.

However much he had disapproved of her relationship with Jock, she reasoned, he could only be pleased now that Jock had left a son or a daughter, Andrew’s first grandchild. It would give his senseless death some meaning. This was the argument that Mary rehearsed in front of the mirror that morning, putting on her best dress and tying her hair back with a comb.

Alice answered the door. When she saw Mary, she said, ‘I thought I told you . . .’

‘This is important,’ said Mary. ‘It’s about Jock.’

Alice beckoned her in and showed her into the drawing room, where Andrew was standing with his back to the fireplace, where a fire was already lit. She had seen only the back of his head at the memorial service and he looked much older than the last time she had seen him properly, a year ago when he had come to her home, called her a whore in front of her mother and told her to stay away from his son. That was the day before Jock moved in with her for good.

The strain of the last two weeks had taken its toll on him. There were dark lines under his eyes from lack of sleep and the corner of his mouth had slipped as though he had suffered a slight stroke. His hair was unkempt. Alice’s hair, piled up high like a governess, gave her a haughty look but she had kind eyes and a gentle mouth. She, too, was very pale. Mary was relieved that Alice was there. It would have been a more difficult conversation with Andrew on his own.

‘I came to tell you that I am expecting his child. I thought you should know.’

Andrew took a menacing step towards Mary, his face flushed and furious. For a moment Mary thought he was going to strike or strangle her. But he just put his face close to hers and hissed: ‘Get out of here you little slut, peddling lies about your bastard child. I doubt you know who the father is but it’s certainly not my son.’

Alice took her arm, in a kindly way, and led Mary back to the front door. ‘I’m sorry,’ said Alice. ‘You must understand . . .’

Mary was back home in Buccleuch Street less than three minutes later. It had all gone badly wrong but Mary felt curiously calm and wondered if Andrew Hume had any idea what a formidable enemy he had just made.

9

The ‘Death Ship’ Docks

30 April, Halifax, Nova Scotia

The summit of Citadel Hill in Halifax offers a commanding view of the Nova Scotia coast, a strategic asset that once protected Halifax from its enemies and gave the city its nickname ‘Warden of the North’. On a clear day you can see the old Marconi signal station at Camperdown, more than ten miles away. But early on the morning of 30 April 1912 a cold mist hung over the sea and, even with a telescope, the signalman who had been on lookout at Citadel Hill since before dawn was struggling to see the mouth of the harbour.

Shortly after 8 a.m. he saw what he had been searching for: two masts, a single funnel, and the blurred but unmistakable outline of the cable ship
Mackay-Bennett
. The signalman hoisted a black flag, the agreed signal, to alert those waiting below. He heard shouted commands and, seconds later, saw five men running to pre-arranged destinations and a horse and carriage taking off at speed.

The cathedral bell was the first to toll, joined one after another by the bells of more than forty churches in Halifax, a deafening chain of grief echoing across the city to mourn the dead who were finally nearing the end of their long voyage. All around the world people who had lost loved ones on the
Titanic
had been waiting for this moment. But the
Mackay-Bennett
would bring no good news for anyone today, not in Halifax – ‘the City of Sorrow’ – nor in Dumfries, where the Humes and the Costins were waiting anxiously for news, nor anywhere else. The best the bereaved could hope for would be to put a name to a corpse, to plan a place where they could later come to grieve. The worst news would be not knowing – not knowing for days, weeks or even months. But most likely not knowing ever what had happened to the person you loved whom you would never see again.

On the deck of the
Mackay-Bennett
Captain Larnder could hear the church bells in the distance as the ship passed McNab’s Island. For the past three days, as they headed back towards Halifax, Larnder had felt a profound sense of relief that this unpleasant mission would soon be over. He – indeed, all the
Mackay-Bennett
’s crew – had managed to disassociate themselves from the human horror of their work by concentrating on the logistic and physical challenges of their task. Now, surrounded by coffins and corpses, haunted by the sound of the bells in the wind, Larnder faced for the first time the emotional reality of his mission and braced himself for the worst that was still to come. In the distance he could see hundreds, no thousands, of people standing in silence, shoulder to shoulder, the full length of the wharves, their hats removed. Others, further back from the water’s edge, were standing on rooftops. Ships in the harbour cut their engines, their flags at half mast as a mark of respect.

This last leg of the
Mackay-Bennett
’s voyage seemed to Larnder to last a lifetime or, rather, 306 lifetimes if you judged it by the number of bodies they had lifted out of the sea. Larnder was in a hurry to get it over with. Last night’s storm had stilled, leaving the sea in the harbour glassy smooth, and he ordered the ship to continue ahead at full speed, making a note to that effect in the log. To his annoyance, he saw pilot boat number 2 heading towards them from Herring Cove. The pilot would want to board. He slowed just enough to shout to the pilot, Frank Mackie, that he would not be needed today and carried on towards the harbour. At 8.50 a.m. they passed the Maugher Beach lighthouse on McNabs Island. At 9 a.m., as they approached the quarantine area, the
Mackay-Bennett
was intercepted by the quarantine boat
Monica
and the tugboat
Scotsman
. Now Larnder had no option but to heave to. Dr Norman E. Mackay boarded them from the
Monica
, a legal requirement when a ship entered the harbour with a dead body. Larnder at once recognised Chief of Police John A. Rudland on the deck of the
Scotsman
. Rudland boarded the
Mackay-Bennett
, accompanied by detectives Horace Kennedy and Francis Hanrahan. With them was a representative of the White Star Line, P. V. G. Mitchell. Captain Larnder greeted the men with a firm handshake as they stepped on to the ship, the boarding party visibly shaken to find themselves surrounded by corpses.

For the first time, those waiting on the shore were able clearly to see the
Mackay-Bennett
. They saw ‘her afterdeck piled high with coffins and on her forward deck a hundred unshrouded bodies’, the
New York Times
reported next day. Some fainted and fell. Others just turned away in tears.

From here, Larnder would normally have navigated towards the Commercial Cable Company’s wharf at 155 Upper Water Street, the
Mackay-Bennett
’s usual mooring, but instead he ordered a course towards Flagship Pier, the Canadian Navy’s anchorage at Coaling Jetty No. 4. Twenty sailors from the cruiser HMCS
Niobe
were already guarding the gates to keep out intruders, allowing the ship to dock in privacy and unload its cargo of dead away from the scrutiny of crowds and press cameras. Thirty horse-drawn hearses stood in line, the polished glass and lacquer of the carriages and the top hats and morning coats of the undertakers promising at last some dignity for the dead.

At 9.40 a.m. the
Mackay-Bennett
hauled alongside the pier and moored. Suddenly, as if it were a sign from God, the clouds parted and the sun shone brilliantly, turning the leaden water of the harbour into silver. But it seemed to bring no comfort to Captain Larnder who was seen pacing backwards and forwards on the bridge, his hands clasped behind his back, as the crew tied up the
Mackay-Bennett
fore and aft and lowered the gangway. He was not normally a nervous man – quite the contrary – but now it was all over Larnder had become acutely anxious. He had every reason to congratulate himself, having achieved everything that he had set out to do. At considerable risk to his men and his vessel, he had sailed more than 1,500 miles in hazardous conditions through ice fields without a single loss of life. He had recovered more bodies from the wreck of the
Titanic
than anyone could have expected him to. Yet he felt unsettled and full of apprehension and not without cause. At 11.30 a.m. when the last of the bodies had been unloaded from the
Mackay-Bennett
, Captain Larnder ‘tall and square of build’ invited the press on board. In the dining saloon of the
Mackay-Bennett
he opened the ship’s log and, slowly tracing his fingers over the brief entries, recounted the events of the previous ten days. He hadn’t, however, anticipated the gathering storm over the large number of bodies that had been buried at sea, nor did he understand the grief and frustration of those whose loved ones had been recovered but who would not have their bodies to take home with them.