Legacy of Secrets (28 page)

Lily followed the rest of the passengers onto the deck. She had lost everybody she ever cared about, including Finn. Now she did not care if she lost her life. She hung back, letting others go first. She had given up the fight. Now it was God’s choice if she lived or died.

She hurried after the sailors who were rushing down the companionways to the steerage decks. They pushed the poor Irish immigrants roughly to the rail. “Get ready to jump,” they yelled, thrusting them over the side and into the lifeboats bobbing below.

The first boat was soon filled with women and children, and rowed by four strong men it bobbed away into the fog. “Pray for them,” a young Irish man who had been helping load the boat said bitterly, “for they will surely need it.” Beside him, his wife crossed herself and her terrified children howled and clung to her ragged skirts.

The ship suddenly settled deeper in the water, hurling them all down the sloping decks. Terrified, Lily grabbed the rail, staring down at the final boat. It was almost full. She glanced at the young man who had been helping. He was standing next to her, looking despairingly down at his
wife and children in the boat, and they stared, panic-stricken, back up at him. There was just one place left for Lily. She looked at the young wife, imagining her widowed with six mouths to feed, alone in a new country, knowing no one, possessing nothing, her man drowned and all hope gone.

“What good are they without
him?”
she cried bitterly to the captain. “How would they manage without a husband and a father? They might as well drown now as die of starvation when they reach Boston. His place is with them in that boat.”

The young man looked longingly at his wife and then back at Lily. “Faith, I can’t let y’do this, miss,” he said quietly.

“You have no choice,” Lily replied. “I’m not going.” The captain knew she meant it. He stared wearily into the fog, telling himself she was nothing but trouble. Then, like a star from heaven, he saw an answering green flare. Help was at hand at last. He ordered the man to jump.

“God bless you, miss. We shall niver forget you,” the young man cried. His wild blue eyes linked with Lily’s for a split second and then he jumped out into the darkness after the others.

Suddenly the
Hibernia
began to shake like an animal in its death throes. It shuddered and jittered and the timbers screamed as they were rent apart and it began to slide slowly onto its beam ends. Lily heard the captain shout a warning, but then she was knocked off her feet and sliding helplessly toward the edge. She grabbed for the rail but it was too late. She plunged over the side into blackness.

The icy seas closed over her head. The waves sucked her down and down and her lungs were bursting. She realized she was dying after all. Fate had cheated Finn of that pleasure. This was the way it was meant to be.
This
was her terrible punishment.

N
ED
S
HERIDAN WAS IN
the first rescue boat, riding the swell and peering through the mist for the flares that would guide them to the sinking ship. Other boats bobbed behind, searching for survivors by the light of whale lamps high in their prows, and they roared in dismay as they saw the
Hibernia
suddenly list steeply, tossing people into the sea.

Ned tied a rope around his waist and plunged into the icy water after them. Lily bobbed to the surface near him, then immediately went under again, swamped by another wave. He grabbed her as she came up a second time and the other men hauled them over the side. They laid her in the gunnels, staring anxiously at her.

“It’s a young girl,” they said, shaking their heads, thinking she was already dead, though Ned turned her over and began to thump the water from her lungs. After a few minutes she began to cough and splutter and they went hurriedly back to rescue the others.

Wrecking schooners were already pulling alongside the ship, waiting for the captain to leave so they could claim it as salvage. The captain stood at the rail while they rigged a Manila hemp line, watching as his crew scrambled across to safety, clinging like monkeys to the wavering cable, cursing and shouting as they were dunked into the freezing ocean. But he had no intention of handing over his ship; he
intended to sit it out until the fog lifted, and then get a tow to port.

The women and children and the sick and old were taken into the townsfolks’ homes, while the men were billetted at the Pantheon Hall or the Hall of the Sons of Temperance, and given dry clothing, blankets, and hot food.

Ned carried Lily wrapped in a blanket to his own home on Main Street. A young Irishwoman walked behind him with her baby in her arms, while her six small children rode in a cart pushed by a sturdy lad. She wailed loudly at being separated from her man, and her children wailed noisily along with her.

Alice Sheridan was waiting at her door. She was a small, slender pale-faced woman, plainly dressed in the manner of her Quaker forebears. The simplicity of the Methodist Church had long since taken over from the strictness of the Quakers on Nantucket, but Alice Sheridan still followed the same tenets of sharing and giving and like the other townswomen she opened her home and her heart willingly to the refugees.

When she saw them approaching she hurriedly called her daughters, seventeen-year-old Abigail and ten-year-old Betsy, to fetch more blankets from the chests, and to search the linen presses for whatever children’s clothes they could find. “For we shall have a full house tonight,” she said, counting the ragged crying children. She scooped the baby from the tired mother’s arms, urging her inside, and the children trailed in after her. It wasn’t until Ned lay his blanket-wrapped bundle down on the braid rug in front of the roaring kitchen fire that she even noticed Lily.

Silence fell as they all stared down at her. Lily’s long black hair trailed in a sodden mass down her back. Her face and hands were blue with cold and there were shocking bruises on her white throat. Ned looked at her fine bone structure, the dark level brows, and long curling lashes lying in perfect half-moons across her cheeks. He
noted her beauty and her pallor and her absolute stillness and thought he had been too late. She was dead.

“Why, she’s just a girl,” his mother exclaimed, tears of sympathy springing to her eyes.

“ ’tis the lady that gave me husband her place in the boat. She saved me husband’s life,” the young mother cried, recognizing her. “And now the poor thing has lost her own.” And she began to cry again, followed in loud chorus by her youngsters.

“Hush your wailing,” Alice Sheridan said firmly. “The girl’s not dead yet, and it would be nobody’s fault if she were. Shipwreck is like love and war: ‘everything’s fair,’ and you just do what has to be done.”

While her elder daughter, Abigail, dunked the squalling children into a tin bath of hot water, Ned ran for the doctor. Lily’s breathing was shallow; sometimes it seemed to stop altogether and they held their own breaths anxiously until there was a faint fluttering sigh and they knew she was still with them.

The doctor came quickly. He took Lily’s pulse and listened to her heart and her chest, and he shook his head over the bruises on her throat. He said she was suffering from shock and exposure and that they could expect a raging fever that night. There was no saying how long it might last: one night, two … a week even. If the fever broke soon enough, she would survive. “If not,” he said, lifting his shoulders in a helpless shrug, “there are already nineteen dead that we know of and a dozen others missing. The wonder is it wasn’t more.”

Ned was banished to sleep in the attic and Lily was tucked up in his bed with the brass warming pans and hot bottles and the fire roaring in the grate, because despite the fever the doctor had warned the room must be kept at an even temperature. Alice kept vigil over her while the others stole helplessly in and out.

In the early hours of the morning, unable to forget her, Ned left his attic bed and went downstairs. His mother was dozing lightly in a chair by the fire, and he stole across the
room and looked down at the sleeping beauty in his bed. As he watched, her heavy lids fluttered and her eyes opened.

She was so young and so lovely and so mortally ill, Ned’s heart somersaulted with pain and love. He wanted to wrap his arms protectively around her and tell her that he would never let anything bad happen to her, that he would look after her and cherish her forever. But then her eyes closed and she was back in her own twilight world again.

The fog cleared the next morning and the
Hibernia
could clearly be seen from the shore, sitting out on the shoal. Her captain was still aboard and the two wrecking ships were standing by. Ned and his father saw that the
Hibernia’s
list was even steeper than before and they knew the vessel was doomed and there would be no need for a tow.

The captain gave orders to remove his cargo and by the time night fell half her ballast had been removed and the
Hibernia
floated free. The wreckers moved in quickly to take what else they could before she swung onto her beam ends and went to the bottom.

Ned returned home that night with Lily’s two water-stained burgundy leather trunks and the intriguing information that she was the Lady Lily Molyneux, aged seventeen and en route to visit a relative in New England.

His two sisters glanced at each other with amazed little cries. “Lady Lily,” they exclaimed, impressed. They doubted a “Lady” had ever been seen on Nantucket before.

Like their brother they were blond, blue-eyed, and Nordic-looking. They were quietly pretty and modest, brought up in a household that taught the simple values were what mattered; a love of God and a love of their fellow men. “Sharing, caring, and giving,” had been their parents’ watchword, and naturally it had become theirs, though it didn’t stop them from eyeing Lily’s matched trunks and wondering what they might contain.

“A Lady must surely have some pretty things,” young Betsy said a little enviously, smoothing down her brown
woolen skirt, imagining it was satin or silk and light as a moonbeam instead of coarse and heavy enough to keep out Nantucket’s winter winds.

Lily’s fever still raged, vaulting up and down, sometimes leaving her shivering and sometimes drenching her in sweat. Betsy and Abigail took turns with their mother, sitting quietly at the bedside, their eyes fixed anxiously on her. But with the storm over, Ned was reluctantly forced to return to Boston.

N
ED WAS TWENTY-THREE YEARS OLD;
lean, young, and very handsome; with heavy straw-blond hair that slid silkily over his light-blue eyes. He was strong-jawed and clean-shaven and muscular.

When he had finished school he had run off to seek his fortune in the theater. He was working as a barman in a Boston saloon to earn enough money to get him to New York when one night a dramatic-looking man strode in. He was wrapped in a voluminous black cloak with a flowing silk shirt, a pearl-gray silk cravat and a wide-brimmed black hat. He tapped on the counter with the silver tip of his malacca cane and demanded brandy in ringing tones.

Ned’s face lit up. He knew he must be an actor, looking the way he did and with a voice like that. He served him his brandy and respectfully asked him who he was.

It was a question de Lowry hated. He glared at Ned, his bushy black eyebrows meeting in a scowl. “Young man,” he retorted coldly, “you should not need to ask
who
I am.”

Ned apologized humbly, explaining that he had just left college and that his ambition was to be an actor. “A famous one like yourself,” he added, taking a calculated guess.

De Lowry inspected the young barman with interest. He liked what he saw: with that face and that physique he didn’t need to act. And he could see he was young and trusting and unwise in the ways of the world, and that suited the older man just fine. He immediately offered him a job. “Of course, the salary is almost nothing, dear boy,”
he boomed, “but I am offering you the invaluable opportunity to learn an actor’s craft from a master.”

It was the answer to all Ned’s prayers. He gave up his job that same night and became a member of the de Lowry Famous Traveling Players. He was an actor at last. He got to play everything from a cabin boy to a French aristocrat as well as acting as general factotum to the de Lowrys, fetching and carrying for them; jugs of stout and bottles of whiskey mostly. He was also useful in arranging credit at saloons and cafes where his fresh-faced innocence worked better than de Lowry’s shifty bravado.

The de Lowry Famous Traveling Players performed in chilly flea-bitten halls in cheap towns, and Jacob de Lowry, whose real name was Jacob Leech, wrote most of the plays with the unskilled assistance of his wife, the blond and overblown Sasha Orlov. They mostly were costume melodramas meant to show off de Lowry’s aging and tightly corseted physique to advantage. With his flashing dark eyes, his pomaded, black hair and twirling mustache, dressed in close-fitting breeches, high boots, and flowing silk shirts, he was quite a sight. The tear-jerking romances displayed Sasha’s bosomy charms to the full. In her floating chiffons, she had acquired a reputation for “carelessness” with her draperies, allowing a little more of her flesh to be revealed than she should, and keeping her audiences on the edges of their seats in anticipation of more.