The Second Mrs. Astor(85)

She broke away from her group, walked up to the woman. She pressed the sable into her arms.

“Here. This is for you.”

Then she kept walking without looking back.

*

The gangway down to the pier was steep, so Carrie took her arm for safety. Vincent, on the other side of her, did not touch her, only stared straight out into the mob gathered below. There were powder flashes exploding all around and bright white lights glaring from above. After all her time secluded in the captain’s cabin, in the endless blanket of fog, she was a little blinded by it all, and so didn’t see her sister until they were nearly upon her.

“Maddy!” Katherine cried, and pushed past the line of men keeping everyone back, sprinting up the last few steps to embrace her. “Oh, thank God, thank God! We didn’t know if you had really survived or not! There’ve been so many different reports in the papers, and some said you were fine, and some said you were injured, and then—just now, just now, people in the crowd were saying that you had died as the ship was docking! That you died!”

Katherine’s tears smeared Madeleine’s cheeks. Her fingers dug into her back; her breath was coming in whistles.

“It’s all right,” Madeleine said, her hand against the nape of Katherine’s neck. “I’m all right.”

Mrs. Astor, came the murmur of recognition from the thousands of people below them, their faces upturned, their eyes shining and their mouths shaping her name. Mrs. Astor, Mrs. Astor, look who it is, Mrs. Astor.

Carrie said mildly, “We should keep moving.”

Vincent walked around them. “We don’t need the ambulance we brought for her. I’ll get the limousine.”

*

They had brought an ambulance, along with Mr. Dobbyn and two doctors and two more motorcars. Madeleine kept her group together in one auto, Katherine and Carrie and Rosalie, with Vincent driving. The other automobiles would split up, each taking a different route to meet them back at the Fifth Avenue mansion.

Katherine had seized Madeleine’s hands as soon as they were seated and not released them since. The brick and marble fa?ades of the city rushed by ambered with light, sparkling in the falling rain; from inside the plush comfort of the limousine, everything began to take on a hazy, unreal edge.

Despite Vincent’s efforts to shake them off, a string of motorcars kept behind them, sleek gleaming sharks that matched their every turn.

“We’re going home first,” Katherine was saying. “Our home, I mean—Mother and Father are so anxious to see you. They wanted to come, too, but Vincent and I convinced them not to—there were already so many of us, and Father’s been so ill—”

Madeleine looked up.

“He broke his leg a few weeks back. I didn’t write to tell you, because I didn’t want you to stew over it, as there was nothing to be done that wasn’t already being done. And it was your honeymoon, after all. But as soon as we heard about Titanic—oh, Maddy. We’ve just been . . .”

Katherine lost her voice. The rain spattered against the windows, clinging to the glass in fiery jeweled dots.

“So worried,” finished Vincent, his tone even.

“Father was up all last night, Mother told me. He’s hardly slept since the news broke. And Maddy—Madeleine . . .”

Katherine released her hands, lightly touched her sister’s stomach.

“Are you . . . ?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, God,” said Katherine, and started to cry. She stuffed her hands against her mouth. Madeleine leaned against her and Katherine instantly wrapped both arms tight around her, but the tears didn’t stop.





CHAPTER 29


The nature of hope is curious to me. It can sustain us through the darkest of times. It can buoy us above every reasonable expectation of despair. Yet hope can shatter us just as readily as the darkness can. People refer to it as false hope, but I think that’s misleading, because the feeling itself is painfully true.

It is a treacherous hope, more precisely. A dangerous one.

Your brother would not abandon his hope, even as it tore him to pieces. I watched it happen, day by day. In these private pages, I will admit to you that Vincent and I were never friends. We will never be friends. But witnessing him unravel by degrees stirred nothing but pity in my heart.

Even Captain Roberts, whom I sent in the Noma up to Halifax to claim your father’s body, told anyone who would listen that it might not be John Jacob Astor in the pine coffin they were returning to us. It might have been someone else in his monogrammed clothing. Poor Mr. Robins, perhaps, wearing castoffs.

Because in all of our fantasies, the indomitable J. J. Astor had not succumbed to the sea. He was out there somewhere still, on some mythical ship, miraculously alive and breathing and on his way home to us.

The difference between everyone else and me, I suppose, was that I knew in my heart that it was a fantasy. I had already relinquished any hope for his survival.

I think even before Carpathia, I had relinquished it. I’d seen firsthand those scattered, terrible human dolls in the North Atlantic. The glistening mountains of ice lit pink by the dawn.

I understood how barbaric hope could be.

For your sake, Jakey, I could not allow myself to be destroyed by it.

*

The Californian searched the ice fields where Titanic went down. The Virginian, the Birma, the Parisian, the Frankfurt. Even more steamships offered to come.