Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,23

of the promenade that was gone, but a whole section of the ship’s outer wall. Below them an unearthly fog unfurled, and far below that was the splashing, churning sea—the sea that was even now pouring in through the gap that had been torn into the side of the ship. The vast red-and-black iron flank of what must have hit the Princess slid past them and into the vast darkness of the ocean at night.

Vida’s heart was oddly still. Everything seemed not quite real. But she didn’t at all like the terrible expressions on everybody’s faces. “Say something,” she said in what she had meant to be an irreverent way. Instead it came out sort of soft and trembling. Nobody did say anything. Fitzhugh revolved and began walking and then running down the hall, and first Sal, and then Camilla, and then Vida followed.

They ran up and up, through the fine halls of the first-class quarters, until they reached the top deck. The chaos Vida saw there made her a little less embarrassed about what all that running had done to the arrangement of her hair, the loveliness of her gown. And she forgot, too, the hope of a reprieve from all these long faces. Every face she saw had a sickly pallor, every pair of eyes seemed not quite to see. Bodies charged, yelled, pushed, grabbed at anything to no obvious purpose. Some people had arrived in their nightclothes, others in their topcoats and carrying their suitcases. But what could be so wrong, she reasoned. The ship still floated.

The lights were still on, illuminating the wide field that was the open-air part of the ship. The fog hung over them but there seemed to be no wind, no menace in the air, and Vida glanced at Fitzhugh, at Sal, at the awful, terrible, beautiful Camilla, for some sort of agreement that perhaps the worst was over.

She found none.

She knew by the way Fitzhugh was speaking to the captain, who had appeared suddenly in his crisp blue-and-white uniform, that the worst was yet to come. “I saw it,” Fitzhugh told him, his voice low, even as his eyes roved constantly, alert to all that was said or done around him.

“A steamer?”

Fitzhugh’s head jerked in swift agreement. “Hit us amidships on the port side.”

“Must have ripped a damn big hole. There’s already flooding in the engine room.”

Fitzhugh’s steady blue gaze rose up and met the captain’s eyes. “This ship is unsinkable.”

The captain nodded. “Of course, sir.”

“Practically speaking, she is unsinkable.”

“It is a Farrar ship, sir,” he said dutifully.

“The newest and most modern of our fleet.” Fitzhugh averted his eyes. “But as a precaution we should get the women and children into life vests.”

“We’ll want to keep things calm.”

“Yes.” Fitzhugh drew breath into his chest, as though trying to inflate his very stature. Incredibly, he did look a little taller. “Someone get me a bullhorn.”

Vida watched him climb onto a deck chair and boom his voice across the night, and she felt her skin crawl with the strangeness of it all. Her mind couldn’t quite keep up. None of this was real, was it? She couldn’t seem to believe that any of this was real. That bizarre and pathetic scene, in which a hundred people milled around, and ceased their clamoring for answers, and listened to a handsome young man who wore a tuxedo with the logo of the Farrar Line embroidered at the lapels. He was telling them there was nothing to fear, it was only that every precaution must be taken after a collision in the open ocean. What nice words he chose, and how good he looked in command, his expression serious, his brows drawn together, his body, compact and strong, gesticulating in such a way that the crowd did quiet. They sighed, relaxed, nodded to each other in agreement that with someone very impressive in charge they could trust in things again, that they were safe.

But the tiny little hairs on Vida’s arms, the coolness in her heart, told her otherwise. She had ever been the sort who made her own luck—as a little girl, she had wanted a pony, and so it had been. When she was grown enough to want finer things, she had decided that she would make herself the most talked-about young woman in San Francisco society, and so it had been. And she had wanted to do it her own way, and have more fun than all the debutantes hunting for husbands, and