Maggie opened her eyes and watched as the stern of the ship soared higher and higher above the water, the massive propellers looming out of the blackness. Despite their distance, the cacophony of terror was still audible to her frozen ears.
Listening to the horrifying screams and the chilling crunching and grinding of metal, Maggie retreated into herself. The faces of those she had encountered on this journey flashed across her mind as if in a movie reel; the boiler man hiding among the mailbags at Queenstown, the girl with the rash who was so broken-hearted to be turned away at the health inspection line, the Priest with the camera who’d spoken to her as he left the ship at Queenstown. She had thought it a shame at the time that these people wouldn’t share the experience of sailing across the Atlantic on this breath-taking ship. It would seem that God had a mind for those people and had spared them, as he had spared her.
Unable to find a way to respond to what was happening, she wondered about the lady travelling on her own with the seven children, about Elsie and her family travelling from Wiltshire, the honeymooning couples they had met, the little boy she had watched playing with the spinning top, the Marconi boy who Harry had asked to send her message, the ladies she had watched taking afternoon tea in their fine silk dresses. She saw every one of their faces in her mind now and wondered what their fate was; wondered whether they were out here on the sea with her, or screaming in terror on the sinking ship. She could not even begin to think about those she had travelled with; those she knew as family, her aunts and cousins, the friends she regarded as brothers and sisters of her own, even though they were not. She tried desperately to block their panic-stricken faces from her numbed mind and rocked back and forth, cradling her shivering knees.
‘Good Lord,’ one woman gasped, as a dreadful rumbling roar came from the ship, the majestic funnels ripping from their fixtures and crashing into the decks, and all who stood on them, below. ‘May God have mercy on their souls.’
Another woman led the group in prayer as the scraping and crunching of steel filled the air around them and the brilliant lights of Titanic finally flickered and went out.
Despite the enveloping blackness, the remaining bulk of Titanic was still visible as an eerie silhouette against the starlit sky, and for a few, brief moments the stern reared up, perfectly perpendicular, before plunging with a peculiar gracefulness into the icy waters.
‘She’s gone,’ somebody said. ‘God bless us and save us all. She’s gone.’
*
Maggie felt strangely calm. It was as if she were in someone else’s dream, almost unable to believe that this was actually happening to her; unable to believe that she had just seen Titanic slip into the sea.
The bitter cold of the Atlantic night quickly seeped through her body; her uncontrollable shaking was almost the only sensation she was conscious of.
*
The night engulfed them. Time seemed endless.
With the lights from Titanic gone, they were plunged into total darkness. For a while, the frantic thrashing of a thousand people in the water and their desperate cries for help continued, but eventually they faded and stopped.
Silence.
Drifting in and out of consciousness, Maggie saw blurred images of icebergs around her, vaguely aware of the ominous creaking coming from them. She had waking dreams that the ice was alive, silently, menacingly creeping towards their tiny lifeboat, ready to consume it and all who sat in it. She screamed aloud in terror. A man placed his arm around her.
Images flashed across her salt-filled eyes; other lifeboats bobbing around in the water, frozen bodies, blue faces.
Sensations came and went; someone helping her off with her own, thin coat which was soaked from the water she and Peggy had splashed through on the way back from their cabin the final time.
‘I have two coats,’ she heard a well-spoken American lady say. ‘Take this one. It will keep you warmer.’ She had a sensation then of a heavy, dry coat being placed around her. She heard a dog bark next to her and the same lady shushing it. ‘Quiet Edmund. We can give the girl a coat, can’t we?
She tried to say thank you, but no words would come from her mouth.
She heard people talking about paper to burn for light so the rescue ships would be able to see them; heard them searching in their pockets or in the cases they had managed to bring with them, looking for letters, or other scraps of paper. For some reason she thought she had some letters in her coat pocket, but her hands couldn’t feel them. She assumed she must have dreamt it.
Babies crying, mothers comforting them, women comforting the mothers and wives who wailed for their husbands and sons who had been left behind.