Unspeakable (18 page)

“Kick your legs,” I yelled through gulps of air as I grabbed the vest's strap. We needed to break away from the desperate mob. But from the dark below, a hand grabbed my ankle, its partner clutching further up my calf. I thrashed and kicked, desperate to break free, but they only grasped tighter, climbed higher, dragging me to my death as they scratched and scrabbled for life.

I wouldn't let them drag Meg down, too. Letting go of the belt again, I sank under the water. My lungs burned and my kicking slowed. And just as I was about to give in to the sinking darkness, the hands suddenly went limp and let go.

I broke the surface once more, exhausted, and reached for the vest, but my numb fingers couldn't close around the string. Ice floes still drifted in these waters, even in May. It had to be below freezing. Meg shifted her weight off the vest, two flaps of six cork blocks in canvas the only thing keeping us afloat, even though it couldn't carry us both at the same time. She pushed it toward me.

I wanted to protest, to insist that she stay on it. I was the stronger of the two, but I could barely even catch my breath. The
Storstad
seemed motionless in the distance, a mile or two away. I dropped my head. There was no way we'd make it. Voices still cried out in the dark, but there were fewer now. Perhaps they were saving what little energy they had left. Perhaps they had none.

Meg and I took turns resting on the jacket and kicking along beside it; if nothing else, it kept us moving. It made us feel like we were doing something. It separated us from the frosty corpses that drifted at the mercy of the current. 'Twas as though a whole village had drowned. I don't know how long we struggled in the water. But as the cold numbed our limbs and despair numbed our hearts, I looked at Meg and knew she'd reached the point where she didn't want to struggle anymore.

“Meg,” I gasped, reaching for her as her face dipped below the surface. “The lifeboats … just hold on.”

I pulled her to me and the life vest sank beneath us, both
of us floundering for a breath, both of us choking in the dark. “Link your arm through the neck of it,” I said, coughing. “Float on your back.”

But she couldn't. The two coats, hers and Timothy's, weighed her down and neither of us had the strength to remove them.

She went under again.

“I can't,” Meg said as her face resurfaced. “I'm so tired, Ellie.”

“Don't give up,” I pleaded.

“I promised your aunt I'd take care of you”—her voice came in short breaths—“and that I'd never tell you the truth. But at least I can keep one of those promises. Take the vest.” She shoved away from me, from it, from all that might have saved her.

I lunged for her, clutched her collar in my failing fingers, grasping it again and again as she slipped from me. “Meg … don't … I can't hold you.”

“Barnardo's,” she gurgled as she floundered.

Then her head went under for the last time.

Chapter Twenty-Three

2:30 A.M
.

IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN MEG
. She should have been the one prodded with a lifeboat oar and dragged from the water. It should have been her bundled in the sling and hoisted up the side of the
Storstad
. And as long as I live, I'll never understand why it was me.

I shivered from shock as much as hypothermia as Mrs. Andersen wrapped a long shirt around me. I didn't realize I was practically naked. Most of us were, as we huddled in the wet remains of whatever we'd had time to throw on. Mainly nightgowns and pyjama pants, flimsy items that had ripped asunder in our harrowing escape, in our fight to live. The first few survivors donned the extra clothes of the
Storstad
's thirty-six-man crew. The small working vessel was not equipped for passengers, let alone the hundreds of survivors it hauled aboard. As more and more arrived, Captain Andersen and his wife wrapped them in whatever
they could find: tablecloths, pillowcases, and curtains. One man had even resorted to wrapping himself in sheets of newspaper—we were that desperate for warmth.

Mrs. Andersen rubbed my numb arms through the flannel shirt and then closed my frozen fingers around a mug of whiskey, but I felt nothing. I didn't want to feel anything ever again. “Drink.” She lifted my hands to my mouth.

The whiskey burned a path down my gullet.

“Ellie?”

I blinked as he came into focus. Not Jim—Dr. Grant. He was wearing only a pair of trousers, large ones he had tied up with a bit of rope. He gently touched my shoulder. “Are you hurt?”

My reddened limbs tingled and ached as they thawed. I'd been grazed, battered, and bruised. But I was alive. I shook my head.

“I could use your help—if you're able,” he added.

“Are you the master of this ship?” Captain Kendall's voice bellowed and he rushed at Captain Andersen. “You sank my ship—you were going full speed ahead in that dense fog!”

He raved like a madman and rightly so, as Dr. Grant intervened to hold Kendall back.

“
I
wasn't going full speed,” Captain Andersen blurted, outraged by the ridiculous accusation. “
You
were!”

Two crewmen drew the men apart and Captain Kendall staggered, supported by the doctor's arms. His ship lay at the bottom of the St. Lawrence. Two-thirds of his passengers and crew were dead. His worst nightmare.

“Why didn't they let me drown?” the captain cried. “Why didn't they just let me drown?”

He voiced the pain so many of us felt. The question we'd never get answered.

The
Storstad
crew and a few sound passengers continued to help survivors on board. Almost five hundred of us in all. Most, like me, suffered from shock; many had broken limbs and bloody wounds; a few had gone completely mad and needed restraining as they called out names and tried to jump over the rail. Dr. Grant worked tirelessly with me at his side—splinting, bandaging, staunching, breathing life back into the seemingly dead. Nearly two dozen died after being saved, but there was nothing any doctor could do for them. And by the time the few
Empress
and
Storstad
lifeboats went out on their third trip in search of survivors among the debris, they found nothing but drifting corpses. Hundreds of them.

3:15 A.M
.

THE
EUREKA
ARRIVED
almost forty-five minutes after the
Empress
's distress signal and the
Lady Evelyn
after that. They quartered the river in a vain search, and in the end, I heard they found five of our crew on an upturned lifeboat. And many more dead.

But we knew the death toll was much higher. For how many, like Timothy, had gone down with the ship, trapped in tilted alleyways and unable to escape? I hadn't seen Gwen or Kate, Matron Jones or Gaade. Did they make it out? And what about all those passengers who drowned where they slept? Where they now slept forever.

And Jim? And Meg?

I couldn't let my mind go there. I just couldn't.

Shivering, I threw myself into the work at hand, thankful
that Dr. Grant kept me focused on the living, on helping those I could.

At dawn, all the
Empress
passengers pulled from the St. Lawrence, both living and dead, were transferred aboard the other two steamers that would take us to Rimouski, the nearest town.

I stood at the
Lady Evelyn
's rail and took one last look at the
Storstad
as she made ready to continue upstream. In the light of dawn, her bow seemed so much smaller than it had coming out of the fog. The steel was mangled, twisted to port and crumpled in. Bits of
Empress
debris still stuck to it like blood on a blade. Crewmen had laid out the corpses in long rows on the deck of the two steamers. My gaze passed over the hundreds of dead but I didn't let it linger.

They aren't there. They can't be
.

I hadn't seen either of them on the
Storstad
as Dr. Grant and I did our rounds. Given the odds, it didn't make sense that Jim or Meg survived. But it made even less sense to accept that they were gone.

I stepped into the crowd of survivors along the rail as the
Lady Evelyn
and the
Eureka
gathered steam. Huddled aboard, we shivered in the frostbitten wind, holding tight to one another, holding on to the hope that our lost loved ones were doing the same on the other small ship.

Chapter Twenty-Four

“DRINK THIS.”
Steele handed me a crystal glass of amber liquid. Whiskey, I think. Aunt Geraldine's private stock. He must have poured it from the sideboard where she kept her good pinwheel crystal. I'd never even noticed him getting up. The memories had so completely taken over, I was surprised to find my clothes were dry. I brought the cup to my lips, steadying it with both hands as I sipped. Horrible stuff, just like what Mrs. Andersen had given me, but already I felt its warmth radiating in my core. My heart throbbed in my ears, as though I'd just run ten miles.

“Better?”

I nodded.

He didn't take a drink himself. Didn't pick up his notepad.

I swirled the liquid in the glass. Sipped again. “That night was the last time I saw either of them, Meg or Jim.”

I'd seen Meg take her last breath, heard her last word, even though I'd no idea what she meant. As far as I knew,
there were passengers by that name aboard. Retelling those last moments together made me face that horrible truth—Meg was gone. My heart knew it, too. The hope had turned to grief.

But Jim was strong, sound when I last saw him. I wanted Steele to tell me that he'd seen Jim since. That he knew something more. But he said nothing.

“It's funny,” I continued almost to myself, “you never know it's the last time … until it's too late.” I paused. “Like with my aunt, I didn't even know she was ill. I can't remember what I last said to her. Or even know what I would have said, really.” I shook my head. “But the things I never should have said—those are the ones that I'll always remember.”

We sat in silence for a few moments.