Page 18 of Under the Stars

An Account of the Sinking of the Steamship Atlantic, by Providence Dare (excerpt)

Long Island Sound

( nineteen hours before the Atlantic runs aground )

The ship came into view off the starboard bow, where the headlands met the mouth of the Thames River and the entrance into New London Harbor.

I remember how she looked like somebody’s toy boat—how her white sides ducked in and out of sight as the waves tossed her about.

Sometimes you couldn’t tell what was ship and what was foam.

From the main deck below, a surge of cheers reached our ears.

Starkweather turned his head and cupped his hands around his mouth to hail the wheelhouse. “Who is she?” he demanded.

Through the open window, I saw Captain Dustan lower his spyglass and look toward us. “The New Haven, on her way out of port!” he shouted back, across the pelting rain.

Starkweather muttered, Thank God.

—

A confession. When, in the Irvings’ library, I told Starkweather I had no other home to go to—no friend or relation to take me in—I had not given him the whole truth.

In my defense, I spoke without thinking.

True, my mother’s sister Abigail lived with her second husband and a child or two in Roxbury, but we had never quite taken to each other since she deposited me on the Irvings’ doorstep all those years ago, and by now exchanged only the occasional rigid letter.

My father’s people still lived in Portsmouth, so far as I knew—some distance from Boston, of course, and quite unknown to me, but I daresay they would have given me shelter if I had asked for it.

And there was, of course, my father himself—who, having lost his pulpit by reason of his habitual drunkenness and (so I later heard) having been found in a state of grave moral lapse with the blacksmith’s wife, now ground out a living at a small press in Westborough, setting type.

But none of these possibilities occurred to me as I sat in Mr. Irving’s study and watched Starkweather prowl around the room as if it were his own hunting grounds—my mind was too numb, I think, my reason too stunned by what had occurred.

I had no home except this one—no family except the Irvings.

In the end, I folded a few clothes into my carpetbag and traveled back to Quincy with Josephine the next morning.

All these months later, I can still hear the silence inside that carriage.

The steady clop of iron-shod hooves, the rattle of wheels.

Oldest of the three Irving children, Josephine was by far the cleverest. I used to come upon her notebooks, the scraps of paper on which she had scribbled verses and stories—some of them rather good.

She had married only a few months after Mrs. Irving’s death—a hasty affair, courtship and engagement a matter of weeks—and I can’t say I admired her choice.

I thought Mr. Lockwood had taken advantage of her awful grief to secure himself a wife who wouldn’t have given his round face and doleful eyes a second glance, except that he was the son of her mother’s dearest friend and the only young man who came to visit in those first terrible weeks—escorting his mother, like the cunning dog he was.

Oh, I saw what he was up to. The servant sees all, says nothing.

Four years and a sickly child later, Josephine’s regrets piled on her face.

She kept her gaze turned to the window, but that only drew my attention to the droop of her mouth and jowl and eye.

About a mile or so from her house, she turned to me at last. She forced a smile to her lips but her eyes were still cold. “Of course you must think of this as your home, now, Pru,” she said, in a voice that was sucked from a lemon. “You may stay here as long as you like.”

Well, I sensed her game, even then. We each had our secrets to hide, didn’t we?

Sins we would rather keep private. But I was too exhausted to resist, and anyway I happened to need a den in which to lick my wounds.

Josephine showed me to a small, pleasantly furnished room on the third floor, where I fell into bed and slept for two days straight, until Starkweather turned up to haul me off to the police headquarters downtown, where he—and he alone—would interrogate me on every circumstance surrounding the death of Henry Irving.

As things turned out, I counted myself lucky not to have trusted Starkweather with any unguarded facts—in that first conversation and in those that followed, inside the small stone room without a window where they wrung the thoughts from your skull.

—

Now, as I braced myself beside Starkweather on the deck of the Atlantic, watching the steamship New Haven battle its way out of harbor, I realized I had better mind my mouth, once again.

The white ship neared the mouth of the river and the roiling sea.

With frozen fingers, I clutched the railing and strained to keep her in view.

A blast of wind caught me from the side, throwing me against Starkweather’s shoulder.

The deck heeled beneath us, into the trough of a wave, and to this day I don’t know how Starkweather saved us both from crashing across the deck and over the side.

My feet scrabbled desperately on the icy wood.

Starkweather’s chest was like a barrel; his arm came around my ribs and squeezed the breath out of me.

The spray drenched us both. Then the wave threw us back against the railing.

I held on with both arms and shrugged off Starkweather’s grip.

Through the veil of sleet I found the solid white New Haven, smoke billowing from her single stack.

She dove headfirst into a wave, then another.

“She’s turning!” I gasped. “Look, she’s turning!”

I can’t say why I screamed those words with such rabid joy.

What was rescue to me? There was no escaping a bloodhound like Starkweather.

But at least this awful physical ordeal was over.

Aboard the New Haven there would be light—food— warmth .

They would carry us to port and set us back on solid ground, sheltered from the wind and the wet, and maybe—in the distraction of landing, in the confusion of disembarking—I could find my chance to slip away.

Such was the mania of my thoughts, I failed to notice how the New Haven continued turning—first her bow pointed toward us, then her side.

A furious squall of sleet obscured her. When it lifted, her stern flashed between the waves.

I learned forward—as if by straining, I could call her back. Into the wind, I shouted, “What’s the matter? What’s she doing?”

“She’s turning back,” Starkweather said. “The sea’s too rough. She’s not going to risk it.”

“Didn’t she see us? She’s got to help us, it’s the law!”

“A captain’s first responsibility is to his own ship. His own passengers.”

“Coward.” I looked up to the wheelhouse and found Captain Dustan’s tall frame. He lowered his spyglass and held it to his chest, then turned his head to port and raised the glass again.

I followed his gaze. Behind the storm, the sun was higher now, the sky a shade or two lighter. The island I had seen earlier made a darker shadow against the thick gray horizon, its spine more pronounced.

Or was it simply…larger?

I lifted my hand from the railing and pointed. “Is that Long Island?” I shouted.

Starkweather’s face was wet and raw. I supposed mine looked the same. He squinted through the haze of cloud and wind and freezing rain and said, “Winthrop Island, I think. A few miles to the south and east.”

I shut my eyes and channeled my senses into the movement of the anchor cables—the tension as we rode upward, the release as we came down. The wind that throttled us from the northwest.

“Don’t worry, Miss Dare!” he said, over the noise of the wind. “Another ship will come along in due course! The storm will abate before long!”

I waited until that instant of stillness, as we rested in the trough of a wave, to scurry back to the door of the deckhouse and the shelter of the grand saloon.

—

Downstairs in the main saloon, they had broken into the ship’s pantry and found some bread and biscuits and water. A couple of stewards passed around this meager meal—first to the children and the women, huddled under blankets, and then to the men.

Happy Thanksgiving, somebody mumbled.

One of the men was angry—a short, pudgy fellow with a ripe nose and a green-faced wife who clung queasily to his elbow. He stopped the steward who carried the bowl of biscuits and said, “There must be more food! They told me the Atlantic was famous for her table!”

“I’m afraid we don’t provision for the night passage,” the steward answered. “Passengers don’t usually care to take supper so late.”

“Well, I care to take my supper! Where’s Captain Dustan? I’ll have a word with him, by God!”

“Sit down, for heaven’s sake,” said the woman at his elbow. “The idea. Captain’s got enough on his mind.”

“Now, then. We’re all hungry and cold,” said another woman—a Mrs. Walton, whom I recognized from the ladies’ saloon, accompanied by several children and an accent sourced from somewhere in England, as best I could tell.

“It’s nobody’s fault. Poor Captain Dustan’s doing his best. Someone will come to our rescue soon enough. ”

I took my biscuit and found an armchair.

If I closed my eyes and arranged my body so that my head was the same level as my stomach, I found that the seasickness receded somewhat, though it never quite went away.

Like an ache in your head or your foot, you only noticed it less.

The biscuit was dry and hard—a true ship’s biscuit.