“Nothing will. He's too smart to take chances. He'll be all right. You just have to hang on.” And he knew she would. She was that kind of woman.
They went back outside then and stood on the deck for a while, and then she went to find the girls. They were enjoying the trip, and acute boredom hadn't set in yet, although she suspected it would later.
They didn't see Nick again until that night, when he played guessing games with the girls in a sheltered corner of the deck. Most of the male passengers had stayed in the dining room to drink and talk, and Liane had thought it best to remove the girls. No one had got rowdy yet, but perhaps they would. Although no one spoke of it on the darkened ship, the tension was beginning to run high. There were inevitable fears that a German U-boat would strike, and the only way to live with the fears was by drinking. And the men did. A lot.
Liane sat with Nick and the girls, trying to keep their spirits up.
“Knock, knock, who's there? …” The jokes and stories and riddles went on forever, and the four of them laughed as they sat on the stairs. Eventually Liane put the girls to bed and went back outside for a walk. She had left their life vests at the foot of their beds, as the passengers had been instructed to do, and she didn't venture too far, but she needed to get out. The atmosphere in the tiny room was oppressive. The Deauville had been prepared to take on twenty passengers and no more, there were five double rooms and ten singles, and instead they were carrying sixty men, a woman, and two children, with a crew of twenty-one. With eighty-four people on board, the ship felt like it was about to burst at the seams, and the noise from the dining room grew more and more raucous as she stood on the deck with her eyes closed in the wind. She was chilly but she didn't care. It just felt good to be out.
“I thought you'd gone to bed.” She turned as she heard Nick's familiar voice beside her, and she turned to look up at him with a smile. They were all getting used to being in the dark.
“I put the girls to bed, but I wasn't tired.”
He nodded. “Is it hot in your room?”
“Stifling.”
He smiled. “Mine's like an oven, and there are six men in it.”
“Six?” She looked shocked.
“I have the deluxe suite, so-called on the Deauville. So they put five more beds in it. Cots actually. But I don't think anyone cares.” They had all been lucky to get passage at all and they knew it. “But to tell you the truth, I'm not sleeping in my room.”
She remembered the studio he'd switched to on the Normandie after his blowout with his wife. “You do that a lot, don't you?”
“Only on transatlantic crossings.” He grinned and they both laughed. “This time, the captain showed me a perfect little spot. There's a secluded area under the bridge. And they put up a hammock for me. No one ever comes around, and I'm out of the wind, but if I peek around a little bit, I can see the stars … it's heaven.” He looked pleased. Despite his enormous fortune in steel, he was an easy man to please. A hammock under the stars, borrowed clothes from a sailor when his luggage fell overboard. He was good-natured and easygoing and unpretentious. And in that way, he was much like Liane. Between the two of them they had two of the largest private fortunes in the United States, but to look at them one would never have known it. He was in his borrowed seaman's garb. She was wearing gray flannel slacks and an old sweater, her hair was loose in the wind, and she wore no jewelry save a narrow gold wedding band, and they both looked perfectly at ease as they were. The men on the ship had been startled to realize who Nick was, and had they known that Liane was Crockett Shipping, they would have been even more so. She had totally unassuming ways, as did Nick. It was part of their inner beauty. He looked down at Liane after a while. “Do you want me to bring you another cup of coffee or a drink?”
“I'm all right. I'll go to bed in a little while. The girls will stay up talking all night if I don't, and it's so hot down there, they can't sleep either.”
“Do you want me to have another hammock rigged up in my little hideaway for them? There isn't enough room for two hammocks, but they could share one and then at least you'd have peace in the cabin.” It was a sweet suggestion and she smiled at him.
“Then you won't get any sleep. They'll keep you up all night, telling jokes and asking questions.”
“I'd love it.” And she knew he would, but she thought it best to keep them with her.
And then, after a little while longer, she bade him good night. And as she returned to her cabin she thought how remarkable it was that they should meet again, crossing the Atlantic. Before she went to bed, she washed her hair again. She had already had to wash it three times since they'd arrived to get the smell of the fishing boat off her. What an experience that had been. She smiled to herself as she got undressed. It would be funny, if it weren't so tragic. But at least laughing at it now and then kept her from crying for Armand all the time. She was barely able to think about having left him without her eyes filling with tears, and she fought the thoughts off again now as she washed her hair in the tiny sink and dried it with a towel. She did everything in the dark, and she had forced the girls to stop talking when she came in. And she could hear now from the silence in their bunks that they were sleeping at last.
She had just gotten into her own bed, and pulled the sheet over her, when suddenly there was a terrifying, unfamiliar whooping sound, and she sat up in bed like a shot, trying to remember what the sound meant. Was it a fire alarm, an air raid, or were they sinking? With a speed and deftness she hadn't known she had, she leaped from her bed, grabbed their life vests, and shook the girls. “Come on, girls, come on … quickly. …” She pushed Elisabeth into her vest. The child was still half asleep, despite the noise. Then she grabbed Marie-Ange and helped her, and she had both girls halfway out the door in nightgowns, life vests, and shoes, and she struggled to pull her own life vest on over her nightgown. She hadn't even had time to find her own shoes in the dark, but it didn't matter, she crowded into the passageway with the others, emerging from their cabins with startled looks. Most of them had still been awake, but a few of the men looked as sleepy as the girls did. There was an instant cacophony of voices and questions and a shout from the far end from someone who couldn't find his life vest. They pressed onto the deck almost as one mass, and there, in the distance, they saw the reason for the sirens. A ship of indeterminate size looked like a ball of fire on the horizon, and members of the crew moved among them now, explaining in rapid French that a troop ship out of Halifax had been hit by a U-boat two days before. The Deauville had just now gotten the message. There were men in a lifeboat with a transmitter too weak by now to have reached them at any greater distance. The ship had been burning for two days, and it had carried more than four thousand men bound for England.
Both the news that they heard and the sight of the burning ship were terrifying in the stillness of the summer night. There had been a gentle breeze before, but now there wasn't even that. It was as though they were moving toward hell, and all eyes were held riveted by the inferno ahead.
The captain came out on the bridge with a bullhorn in his hand, and spoke to them all in English. He knew that most of the passengers were Americans and he needed their immediate attention.
“If any of you have medical training … nursing … first aid, any experience at all, you are needed very badly. We do not know how many men from the Queen Victoria are still alive…. Will the two doctors on board please come forward … we will be taking on as many men as we can.” There was a moment of silence. “We cannot radio to other ships for help, or the Germans in the area will identify our position.” As this reality sank in, a total silence fell on them all. It was entirely possible that the Germans were still nearby, and the Deauville might be next. It was a terrifying thought, and the fire raging on the Queen Victoria was a clear illustration of what could happen to them.