Gwyneth Atlee Page 16

  If not for the tremendous boom, he would have thought they’d struck a bar or snag. Either would be enough to end the Sultana’s life and ruin him financially. But the blast meant an explosion, unless he missed his guess. As Mason pulled on his clothes and shoes, he thought first of Confederate artillery. But he soon dismissed the idea as nonsense. When he’d gone to bed perhaps two hours before, they’d been near the river’s center, too far from either shore for shells.

  Too far, also, for an easy swim to land and safety. He would have to calm these people before a panic led to a mass drowning. He’d seen hysterical passengers leap to their deaths from boats that still might float for hours more.

  As he hurried from his room on the hurricane deck, he saw plumes of steam rising into the night and flames already erupting like a brightly colored pox. He realized then that his earlier thoughts of grounding or artillery had been merely wishful thinking. There was only one thing this could be.

  An angry face flashed across his vision, that of R. G. Taylor, the boiler mechanic who had come aboard in Vicksburg to set the boat to rights.

  “Why did you not have this repaired in New Orleans?” He pointed at the leaking bulge as he spoke, his tone accusing Chief Engineer Wintringer.

  Wintringer took offense, as he had drained the boilers and had them scraped and cleaned while they were in the Crescent City. Afterward, he’d nursed them all the way to Vicksburg.

  “But they weren’t bulging or leaking earlier,” Wintringer insisted. “Can’t you patch them up enough to last us to St. Louis? We’ve got to get on quick if we’re to make our load here.”

  “If I do anything at all, I will make a job of it or have nothing to do with it,” said Taylor as he stalked off the boat.

  Mason had ordered Wintringer to go after him, and somehow his chief engineer had changed Taylor’s mind. While the men had quickly patched the bulge to stop the leak, Mason had kept busy securing every passenger he could.

  Securing passengers that might die because of his decisions.

  As he expected, the deck was a chaotic swirl of motion. Men leaping overboard, fighting for the largest and sturdiest-looking boards and planks. He edged past a gaping hole blown in the deck. Steam and smoke billowed out of it as though it were a shaft down into hell. Apart from his own room, much of the Texas cabin, where the boat’s officers slept, had been blown to bits. He tried not to think of the men who had been sleeping there.

  He had only one priority left now, the responsibility of saving as many as he could. Nothing else mattered. Especially not his life.

  * * *

  Absurdly, Gabe thought the small boat was coming to save him— him alone, among the hundreds now struggling, dying in the water. He would climb aboard the rescue and find Yvette in time.

  The delusion exploded as he realized the men aboard—crewmen, by their uniforms—were beating with oars at other hopeful swimmers as they grasped at the boat’s gunwales to pull themselves inside. One shrill voice cut through the cacophony of moans and screams and pleas.

  “You can’t leave me, Edmund! My God, you’re my husband!”

  It was only then that Gabe understood. These crewmen had taken the sounding yawl, the boat sometimes used to test the depth of channels for the steamboat. They were stealing it and abandoning everyone else. Even one man’s wife.

  As he clutched the empty cracker box he’d found, he thought again of Yvette, tried to imagine leaving her—or any of his friends. Impossible. If he found any of them, he would rather drown than live without them.

  He heard a shrill scream, one he thought he recognized. Was that Yvette he saw in the water? He saw only a dark head, smaller than the others. He kicked frantically, trying to maneuver the crate nearer.

  As he began to close the distance, he could make out the plank that she was clutching and the two men trying to wrest it away from her.

  “No!” she screamed, as fierce as either of the men. But one of her arms dangled limp and useless, and it was obvious the men would overpower her.

  “Yvette!” Gabe tried to shout, but instead, unexpectedly, his mouth filled up with water as arms clamped around his ankle, the arms of a drowning man, dragging him beneath the water’s surface.

  * * * Yvette screamed in pain as a flailing hand struck her injured arm.

  Pain turned to fury as a second man grabbed onto the plank she held, then shoved her away.

  “No!” she shouted.

  She tried to regain her hold, but it was useless. If she stayed and fought here, they would drown her. She was neither big enough nor strong enough to stop them. Resentment boiled in her veins, nearly overcoming the chill water. If she’d ever had any illusion that Yankee chivalry existed, this behavior cured her of the notion!

  As no Southern gentlemen were present to rescue her, she would have to use her head to save herself. Reluctantly giving up the struggle, she kicked away from the two men. She saw other floating debris nearby, each piece surrounded by groups of struggling soldiers. Every moment, dozens more splashed into the water. Some clutched each other, as if their bodies might form a raft. Instead, they writhed, then sank almost immediately beneath the river’s surface. Yvette looked away, sickened by the sight.

  She’d have no chance at all here. The best thing to do would be to swim into the darkness, away from the Sultana. She thanked God for the summers she’d spent with her family at Grand Isle and for her mother’s insistence that every one of her children learn how to swim.

  Since she was ten years younger, Maman made sixteen-year-old Pierre give her lessons. Annoyed and impatient, he had tossed his little sister into the waves beyond the third sandbar.

  Frightened half out of her mind, she splashed and clawed uselessly, then sank twice beneath the warm Gulf waters.

  Pierre had dragged her out. “First lesson: never panic, or you die.”

  A harsh lesson, but one she had never forgotten.

  Grimly, she forced her mind to calm. With careful deliberateness, she put her later lessons into practice, using only legs and her uninjured arm. She began to make slow progress, trying to ignore the question that throbbed at her left elbow: How long can I possibly go on?

  * * *

  “The hull’s not damaged! We’ll be landing soon!” Captain Mason shouted.

  But the soldiers on the hurricane deck swarmed past him, heedless of his words. He could do nothing to save them, he realized. They were an animal-like mob now, most of them too insensible with panic to harness their energies to attempt to put out the spreading fire. God help them all, he prayed as he turned away.

  They might not listen to him, but the women and children on the cabin deck might still be reassured. He climbed down to the second level, where he found a group of ladies kneeling behind the main cabin. Over the screams of the trapped and drowning, he could barely hear their prayers.

  “Help will be here soon,” he assured them. “Please, don’t give up hope.”

  They looked up at him as if his voice had been God’s, giving them the answer that they sought.

  Unable to bear their gazes, he turned and rushed inside the elegant main cabin. Steam swirled throughout the shattered deck in scalding clouds. The front of the room tilted, forming a deadly ramp into the fiery center of the deck below. Glancing down into it, he saw bodies strewn amid the flame and wreckage.

  As the smoke thickened, he began to realize he’d been wrong. The Sultana would never regain the shore; nor would the rescuers arrive in time. She was burning far too quickly.

  Keeping toward the rear, Mason dashed about, alternately stopping to try to free those trapped amid the wreckage and to hand passengers everything that he could find that might float. A few soldiers and officers were composed enough to join him, and together they passed chairs, stateroom doors, and even sheeting from the cabin’s interior walls to be thrown overboard.

  On one trip to haul a door out onto the deck, a bone-thin former prisoner clutched him by the arm. As Mason turned to look, he was st
artled by the darkness of the man’s eye sockets, the skull-like contours of his face.

  “My brother’s dead! He’s dead!” Even as the prisoner sobbed the words, his pale face transformed into a mask of fury. “You bastards have gone and killed us all!”

  Ripping free of the man’s grip, Mason recognized the grain of truth in his ranting. But with the thought came a renewed surge of energy. He stepped into the steaming cauldron to see who might be saved.

  * * *

  Gabe kicked at the strong arms that held his ankle and dragged him ever deeper. He felt the man’s grip slipping to his foot. With one last, powerful kick, he lost his shoe and sock to the poor fellow, then struggled toward the water’s surface. His lungs burned with the terrible need to inhale, and black dots with bright outlines began to cloud his vision.

  Too deep, he realized, he’d been dragged too deep to make it back without a breath. In a moment, he would pass out and take in water, anyway.

  Just as Matthew had, back on that cold December day. An image flashed before him of his brother’s face after he’d been pulled out of the river. So pale and swollen he couldn’t recognize the features.

  The memory gave him strength enough to hold back the blackness for another instant, during which he finally broke the water’s surface.

  Gasping and coughing, he looked about him, hoping against hope he’d find the cracker box. But it was gone now, along with any sign of Yvette; he saw only the plank she had been holding, now claimed by the two men who must have drowned her.

  Grief cleaved him like an ax, sending sharp pain shooting from his chest and out his limbs. But on its heels came even more powerful denial. It could not be true. He had not seen her go under.

  Perhaps she’d swum away. Or she’d found some better raft. Somewhere in the dark and moonless night she still lived. She hadn’t yet slipped under; she hadn’t yet drowned.

  Over and over, his heart preached the message, irrational as it was. He ignored his mind’s whispers that he deluded himself, that he’d held out the same insane, impossible hopes the day that Matthew disappeared beneath the ice.

  Though his strength was fading, he swam away from the burning steamboat in the hope of avoiding anyone else who might clutch and drag him under. Farther away, the flickering firelight illuminated a dark mound in the water, too rounded to be a plank, too large to be a box. He prayed silently that he hadn’t located the crew’s pet alligator.

  He did not stop swimming toward it, for his arms and legs now felt so heavy that he knew this mound to be his only hope. Instead, absurdly, he pictured himself riding the gator’s back to safety. He nearly laughed aloud despite the realization that only shock and exhaustion could lead him to find any humor in his situation.

  At last he reached the floating mound and threw one arm over it. It was a drowned mule, its body still warm from its futile struggle. He thought how strange it seemed that he’d traded a live mount for a dead one and how that choice might yet save him.

  If it floated downstream fast enough to keep other men from latching on and swamping him.

  After pulling himself against its belly, between the front and rear legs, Gabe leaned his face into the dead mule’s wet hide to draw the last warmth from its cooling body. And as he did, he tried to convince himself that both Yvette and his three friends still lived.

  * * *

  Jacob realized he should be glad that he survived, that of all the men who’d gone over with the stageplank, he’d been one of the few who’d bobbed back to the surface. He felt no joy in it, though, no great cheer that he’d been stronger than many of the other soldiers who’d clawed at the long wooden walkway for purchase.

  He hadn’t even meant to jump. He’d still been searching for his brother, Seth, and Gabe. But the flood tide of men leaping at the stageplank had swept him along, then forced him overboard before he could veer out of its path.

  The current and the remaining men clinging to it conspired to take him farther from the burning steamboat. As his makeshift raft began to move away, the last clear image Jacob saw was that of Captain Seth running, then leaping from the main deck.

  Jacob’s brother wasn’t with him.

  * * *

  Captain Mason coughed to clear his lungs of smoke. As the fire progressed, he’d been working like a madman to save all he could, but now his arms hung like anchors at his side. All he wanted to do was to sink down onto the deck and sleep, never again to open his eyes, never again to face the devastation he had wrought.

  But still passengers struggled in the water, so he forced himself to resume the task of tossing pieces of wood into the water.

  “Captain, help me!” a new voice shouted.

  Panting, Mason turned toward a man he thought might be a guard.

  “Please, he’s still alive!” The guard beckoned him to follow.

  Mason strode after him, along the outer promenade. The man led him to a spot where the hurricane deck had fallen onto this level. A pair of legs jutted from beneath the wreckage. Surely the man couldn’t be alive.

  But when the guard touched the outstretched legs, they kicked. Mason tried to help the man lift off the deck, but exhaustion had drained him utterly.

  He shook his head. “I can’t. I can’t.”

  Then he shuffled back in the direction of the stern, hoping to throw overboard a few more pieces of debris, not caring that when the fire forced him to leave the Sultana, he’d held back not an ounce of strength to swim.

  Eleven

  Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

  But I with mournful tread,

  Walk the deck my Captain lies,

  Fallen cold and dead.

  —Walt Whitman,

  from “O Captain! My Captain!”

  Over and over, Darien felt the awful jolt leaping from the woman’s skull into his arms, conducted by the plank he’d used to strike the woman’s temple. One of the same planks he now gripped to save his life. As he drifted blindly through the darkness, he saw the ebb and flow of his act: the drawing back of his arms with the stolen length, the swing and follow-through of the deathblow. The second woman he had murdered.

  “Did she tell you she was carrying your child?”

  Yvette had asked him that, and the possibility it might be true rose in his thoughts like gorge. My child. Could Marie have given him the son or daughter that Constance never had produced? The darkness and the river resurrected Marie’s face, but this time one cheek was marred by a red discoloration like a hand slap, the same mark that bloomed on the face of the blond woman he had struck.

  Cold wavelets lapped against his back, but none came colder than his recollection of the crack of the wood against her temple. The sound washed over him, again . . . again . . . again . . . And then a voice rode over the memory, his grandfather’s deep baritone, saying, “This boy’s going to be the finest Russell ever. I can tell he’s destined for great things.”

  Great things. Like murdering two women, perhaps even his own unborn child? I might have been a father. No, it couldn’t be. Yvette had been only striking out at him with the only weapon at her disposal, a hideous, cruel lie. He had to put her words out of his mind now and instead focus on the ones Grandfather had uttered.

  Darien had never questioned the old man’s proclamation or paused to wonder if it had been less the result of patriarchal foresight than a consequence of shattered hopes for his only son. But now, as the current carried Darien downriver, he at last comprehended his grandfather’s loss and the tremendous blow to the old banker’s pride. His only son, Darien’s father, had been stabbed behind a tavern in some sordid misadventure involving a loose woman. Jonathan Russell had bled to death there, leaving behind nothing except gambling debts and a pregnant wife.

  Darien’s thoughts turned to his mother, a hollow shell of a woman. With her own family dead, the beautiful young widow had been forced to live as a permanent guest of her husband’s father.

  From the time Darien had been able to speak, he’d
been aware of an almost overwhelming strain between the two. He’d seen Grandfather touch her cheek once, gently. His mother had cried out and fled the room.

  Grandfather, seeing the child’s wide-eyed confusion, explained to him. “Sensitive woman, your mother. But she knows I mean you both the best.”

  Beyond that, neither ever spoke of their disagreement within his hearing, but the tension was so palpable that Darien often watched them carefully for any sign of the explosion he knew must surely come.

  But it hadn’t. Instead, one evening when Darien was five years old, his mother had kissed her son good night. Tears had glistened in her eyes, but his mother had often seemed so sad that he’d gone right on babbling about the pony Grandfather had promised for his birthday.

  Later, Nora Russell slipped quietly into the night, taking only a small carpetbag and not her son. He had never heard from her again.

  “. . . the finest Russell ever.” Putting aside the disturbing memories of his mother, he focused on Grandfather’s words instead. How many times had he spoken them in that ringing voice that sounded like the thunder of God? As a child, Grandfather had been God to Darien, and his prediction had become a holy prophecy, made all the more sacred by the old man’s death six years ago.

  For the first time ever, Darien wondered about Thomas Russell the man. Could his proclamation have been no more than wishful thinking? Had he seen Darien only as a final chance to leave a better legacy than his wastrel of a son?

  That couldn’t be right, could it? For if Darien weren’t really destined for great things, then that would mean that there had been no reason to build his fortune as he had, no excuse to take three lives. Instead of succeeding on his dead father’s behalf, it would mean that Darien had instead far exceeded him in villainy.

  No! Why else did he yet live when so many had burned to death or drowned? Why else had fate always protected him from calamity, from the battlefield to this very night?

  He held on to the two planks and to all he had— the certain knowledge that he was meant to live beyond this. He was meant to survive and find that grand fate in his future.