By Blood We Live (71 page)

I quit my coffin-trunk the minute I felt I could do so safely, around seven-thirty Thursday night, and ascended the several flights of steps past the squash court and through the seamen's and third-class quarters, down the long crew corridor known as "Scotland Road," and through a maze of passages and emergency ladders eventually reached my own B Deck stateroom in First-Class. The advertising for the
Titanic
had strongly implied that no first-class passenger need be even aware that such things as lesser mortals existed on the ship—another reason I'd chosen the vessel for my escape. Sharp-eyed stewards abounded to make sure those who paid for elevation above the Great Unwashed achieved it, but they, like most of the living (thank God) were prey to appearances. I was deep in conversation with the young and extremely pretty wife of an elderly American millionaire when the door of the stair from below opened and Miss Paxton slipped through.

She was clothed in a gown that must have cost her at least half of what her unfortunate brother had to leave: blue velvet with a bodice of cream-colored lace. A little aigret of blue gems and cream-colored feathers adorned the springy thickness of her mouse-brown hair. She was a tall girl, of the sort referred to by Americans as a "fine, strapping lass"; her jaw was long, her nose narrow, and her blue-gray eyes cool and daunting. She carried a blue velvet handbag and a trailing mass of lace shawl draped in such a fashion as to conceal her right hand and whatever might have been in it, and I fled like a rabbit before she even got a glimpse of me.

"That young person," I said to the head steward as I pressed a hundred dollars American into his hand, "is an impostor, a confidence trickster who has been harassing me for a number of months. I do not know under what pretext she will attempt to get near me nor do I wish to know. Only keep her away from me, or from any room that I am in, for the duration of this voyage. Understand?"

"Yes, sir. Certainly, Lord Sandridge."

As I slipped through into the dining saloon an American matron's Pekingese lunged at me in a fury of yapping. They really should keep those nasty little vermin locked up.

Of course that wasn't the end of Miss Paxton. Having guessed I'd be traveling first-class, she had invested God knows how much in a first-class wardrobe, so I was never sure I could avoid her merely by sticking to the A Deck promenades. Nor could I afford to keep to my stateroom during the night hours when I was up and about. She would, I guessed, be looking for me. By whispers overheard from the cabin stewards and maids—and believe me, a vampire can hear whispers through both locked doors and the conversation of American socialites—I guessed she had garnered allies among them by some tale of disinheritance, persecution, and attempted rape.

She stalked me most of that first night, for she had a constitution of iron; I was eventually reduced to donning an inconspicuous pair of trousers and a tweed jacket and hiding out on the third-class deck among the Irish.

At sunrise I retired to my coffin-trunk again, but I did not sleep with anything resembling peace.

All through that day and the next I heard her footfalls, smelled her blood and dusting-powder, in the dark of my dreams as she moved through the holds.

I dreamed about her.

And I dreamed about the sea.

As Mr. Stoker so obligingly pointed out in his book
Dracula
, we—the UnDead—cannot cross running water, except at the hour of astronomical midnight, and at the moment when the tide turns. He is quite right. It was more than dread that seized me, when I and my vampire master stood on the threshold of London Bridge and he ordered me across. It was a sickness, a weakness that paralyzed me, as if death itself were rising from the moving river below us like poisoned mist. My master laughed at me, the bastard, and we took a hackney cab across the river to hunt. In later years we'd take the Underground. He'd keep me talking, to school me to focus my mind against the panicky disorientation that flowing water produces, but like all vampires I hate the temporary loss of my powers over the minds of the living.

That was the thing that most worried me during that April voyage. That while I could cajole, or manipulate, or charm, or bribe those luscious-smelling, warm-blooded, rosily glowing morsels with whom I was surrounded every night, I couldn't alter their perceptions of me, or of what was going on around them.

I couldn't make them fall in love with me, so they'd be eager to do my bidding.

I couldn't lure them in a trance into nooks and corners of the hold, nor could I stand outside their cabin doors and tamper with their dreams.

Except for the fact that I retained some, though not all, of the superhuman strength of a vampire, I was to all intents and purposes human again, and indeed a trifle less so. The touch of silver would sear and blister my flesh; the touch of sunlight set me ablaze like a screaming torch.

And if this wretched young woman—who was as tall as I, and strong for a mortal—managed somehow to tip me overside, once in the water I would be paralyzed. I would sink like a stone, Simon had warned me, for the vampire state changes the UnDead flesh and we become physically perfect: all muscle, no fat.

Fat is what floats a body. (Simon knows things like that. He's made a scientific study of our state, and is fond of parading his knowledge, solicited or not.) Even in the sunless black of the deep ocean, I would not die, though crushed by the pressure of the water and frozen by its cold. Nor would I be able to move, save for the few minutes after midnight, or when the moon passed directly overhead and turned the tidal flow. Then the magnetism of the moving water would conquer again, and the sluggish currents push me where they would.

I would be conscious, Simon had assured me. (How the hell would
he
know?) I could think of no state closer to those described by Dante in his book of Hell.

And if Miss Paxton shot me with a silver bullet, even if it did not strike my heart, the logical place for her to dump my then-unresisting body would be into the drink.

All these things wove in and out of my dreams, with the clack of her shoe-heels on the storage-hold deck.

It was altogether not a pleasant voyage, even
before
11:39 pm on the night of April 14.

I'd put in a brief appearance in the dining-room that Sunday night, enough so that no over-solicitous fellow-passenger or cabin steward would come inquiring for my health during the daytime. My story was that I was too sea-sick to eat. Most older vampires come to despise the stench of human food. I enjoyed it, and enjoyed too the spectacle of my table-mates shoveling away quantities of poached salmon with mousseline sauce, roast duckling, squabs and cress, asparagus vinaigrette, foie gras and éclairs—to say nothing of gallons of cognac and wines. The flavors linger for many hours in the blood, another reason, incidentally, that we prefer to sup when we can on the rich rather than the poor.

My custom on the
Titanic
was to spend most of my night moving from place to place in the first-class accommodation. I hadn't seen Miss Paxton anywhere on the A or B Decks since Thursday night, but twice, once in the Palm Court outside the First-Class Smoking Room and once in the corridor near my suite, I'd caught the lingering whiff of her dusting-powder. She was still finding her way up onto the First-Class Decks.

She could be waiting for me, gun in hand, around any corner

For that reason I was on the bow deck of the ship—as far forward on B Deck as I could get and a goodly distance from what might have been supposed to be a gentlemanly lurking-place in the First-Class Smoking Room—when I saw a dark mass of almost-clear ice lying straight in the path of the ship.

Being on open water hadn't affected my ability to see in the dark, any more than it affected my ability to detect Miss Paxton's cologne. The iceberg, though several miles away, would be almost invisible to human eyes, for there was no moon that night and the ocean lay flat calm, eliminating even the telltale froth of waves breaking around the dark ice's base. The previous night, in my ramblings around the ship, I'd heard the men discussing a warning of heavy pack ice received from an American steamer coming east, and around dinner-time the temperature of the air had dropped.

I worried no more than did anybody else on-board about the
Titanic
actually sinking, of course. Her hull was divided into water-tight compartments that could be closed at the touch of a button. But I did worry about there being a period of confusion in which one passenger—that is to say myself—might easily be incapacitated (say, with a silver bullet in the back) and dropped overboard without anyone seeing it happen. An investigation might later focus on Miss Paxton's purported vengefulness, but that wouldn't do
me
any good.

I descended to the C Deck well and down the stairs to the cargo-holds, where the "Scotland Road" corridor would lead me, eventually, to the Grand Staircase, and so up again eventually to the Boat Deck, at the rear of which lay the bridge.

And there she was, stepping out of the door of a servants' stair, blocking my path.

She said softly, "I have you, villain."

I said, just as softly, "Bugger."

She brought up her hand and I saw the gun in it. Down here surrounded by the crew quarters the sound of a shot would have brought everyone running, but at thirty feet it wasn't likely she'd miss. If she didn't get me through the heart the silver would cause such extraordinary damage as to both incapacitate me wherever it hit, and to cause great curiosity in the ship's doctor. On land I could have rushed her before she fired.

But I didn't trust my reflexes. I wheeled and plunged for the transverse passageway that would take me—I hoped—down the smaller crew corridor, and so to another stairway up. Her heels clattered in pursuit as I darted around the corner, fled down the brightly lighted white tunnel. I debated for a moment simply stepping into the shadow beside the nearest stairway and taking her as she came past—this late at night it would be easy to drop
her
, unconscious (or dead—I hadn't fed in four days and I was ravenous), over the side.

But she had the gun. And I knew from the past that she was a lusty screamer. I darted to the nearest downward stairway, and found myself lost in the mazes around the squash court and the quarters of lesser crew on F Deck. I could hear her behind me still, though farther off, it seemed. It was astonishing how those metal corridors re-echoed and tangled sound, and down here the thumping of the engines confused even the uncanny hearing of the UnDead. The main stairway led up through the third-class dining-hall but that, I knew, would be the logical place for her to cut me off. There was another, smaller stair by the Turkish Bath, and that's where I was, halfway up, when a shuddering impact made the whole ship tremble and knocked me, reeling, off my feet and nearly to the bottom of the steps again.

I don't think I doubted for an instant that we'd hit that wretched iceberg.

Only a human could have missed it that long. It towered above the ship, for Heaven's sake, glistening but dark: it was almost clear ice, as I'd seen, not the powdery white of ice that's been exposed to the air. I understand (again, from Simon, who wasted not a moment after I finally reached London again in telling me,
I told you so
) that when the upper sides of icebergs melt sufficiently to alter their balance they sometimes flip over, exposing faces that are far less reflective, especially on a moonless night. Even so. . .

I clung for a moment to the stair-rail, listening. The lights still blazed brightly, and after the first long, grinding jar there was no further shaking. But as I stretched my senses out—out and down, to the decks below me—I could hear the dim confusion of men's voices, the clatter of frenzied activity.

And the pounding roar of water shooting into the ship as if forced from a fire-hose.

I thought,
Damn it, if it floods the First-Class luggage hold I'm sunk
. I blush to say that was the very expression that formed itself in my mind, though at the time I thought only in terms of my light-proof double trunk and the two handsome windows in my stateroom. I had no idea what the White Star Line procedure was for keeping track of passengers and luggage on a disabled ship until another vessel could come alongside to take everyone off, but there was no guarantee that any of that would happen until after daylight.

On the other hand, I thought, depending on how much confusion there was, it would now be very easy to dispose of Miss Paxton without anyone being the wiser.

Trunk first.

First-Class luggage was on G Deck, at the bow. The gangways were sufficiently wide to get the trunk up at least as far as the C Deck cargo well. I was striding forward along a corridor still largely deserted—crewmembers sleep whenever they can, the lazy bastards—when the heavy beat of the engines ceased.

Silence and utter stillness, for the first time since we'd lain at Queenstown, filled the ship, seeming louder than any thunder.

I wasn't the only one to find the silence more disturbing than impact with thousands of tons of ice. Doors began opening along the corridor, men and women—most of them young and all of them tousled from sleep—emerged. "What is it?" "Why're we stopped?"

"Hit an iceberg," I said. I pulled a roll of banknotes from the pocket of my tuxedo jacket, and added, "I'll need assistance getting my trunk from the First-Class hold. It contains papers that I cannot risk having soaked." I could have carried the trunk by myself, of course, but if seen doing so I could kiss good-by any chance of remaining unnoticed, unquestioned, or uninvestigated for the rest of the trip.

"I'm sorry, Lord Sandridge." Fourth Officer Boxhall appeared behind me, uniformed and worried-looking. "We may need the crew to stand by and help with the mailroom, if the water comes up onto the Orlop Deck. If you'll return to your stateroom, I'll have a man come there the moment we know one can be spared. At the moment there doesn't seem to be much damage, but we should know more within half-an-hour."

I could have told him there was water pouring into what sounded like several of the water-tight compartments down below, but reasoned he'd have the truth very shortly. One of the stewardesses was looking closely at me, a thick-chinned, fair-haired Yorkshire girl whom I'd seen more than once in conversation with Miss Paxton. She moved off swiftly down the corridor, slipping between the growing gaggles of crewmen. So much for any hope of waiting in my stateroom.