Beautiful Wild - Anna Godbersen Page 0,24

so it had been. She had voyaged out on the Princess of the Pacific, in the name of getting Fitzhugh Farrar, who everyone wanted for a husband, and so it should have been. But it wasn’t. Because besides everything else, the ship had been hit.

And so while the passengers did as they had been told, and kept calm, and put on their life jackets, and as the crew did their orderly preparations so that the lifeboats could be loaded and lowered if necessary, Vida glanced about as though nothing at all was to be believed but this: the ship had been hit hard. Her own eyes had seen how much iron had been torn away by the passing ship. She could sink, and every utterance of the word “unsinkable” was an invitation to the fates and furies to have their destructive way with them. All of it seemed of a piece—that terrible moment of realization in the map room, which made her earlier humiliation at its door seem like a laughable nothing, and the fact that all her bravado was just delusion.

A lot of time must have passed, but time seemed an alien concept in this strange, still place.

Only when the ship began to list did Vida’s heart start beating again, a wild beating, though not because she was surprised. Because she knew finally that the worst was coming. She had been waiting for this moment, for the other passengers to understand what she understood: this had all been a mistake. They were land dwellers, and should not be where they now found themselves, far from shore, on a beautifully polished surface that was tilting, slowly but surely, as though to spill them into the infinite watery world below.

All this time, for reasons she did not understand, she had stood close to Fitzhugh and Sal and Camilla, as though their togetherness at the moment the ship was hit could bind them together in misery forever.

The crew began urging women and children into the lifeboats, and Fitzhugh looked at her—really looked at her, for the first time since he had picked her up and she had demanded to be put down—and said that she should go in the first boat. Then he touched Camilla’s elbow, and told her that she should go, too, that the two ladies ought to stay together, and they would be back onboard soon enough, once the ballast was corrected. What with everything, Vida should not have cared that he seemed to treat them the same, should not have wanted the pure blue of his gaze fixed upon her and her only. But she did, and she drew back from Camilla.

“Not without my parents,” Vida said, and for the first time since everything got turned upside down she thought of her mother and father, and realized they must be in a state of high agitation.

“All passengers will be roused and evacuated.” Fitzhugh cast a worried glance at Sal. “We are boarding several boats at once, so they may already be gone.”

Camilla’s face had a stone fury in it, and she turned away from their little party, and extended her arms to the waiting crewmembers, who gently lifted her over the railing and lowered her into the waiting lifeboat. The tail of her gown trailed over the rail and she was gone.

“Please,” Fitzhugh implored Vida.

An orderly line had formed behind them, and Vida stared at these strangers, at their odd complacency in the face of calamity. Her heart refused to go ahead of these poor souls. Not out of altruism. Altruism had never been and was not now Vida’s chief characteristic. It was that very little of her wanted to be safe. She wanted only to see her mother and father and know they were all right and face whatever the night held with them.

“I must insist,” Fitzhugh said. He did the same trick he’d done before—he took a breath and seemed somehow bigger afterward—and Vida felt sorry for the part of herself that still admired this ability of his.

“Must,” she muttered, chewing and spitting the ridiculous word, and charged down the line to see if her parents were among those who had queued up in a vain pretense of normalcy. She did glance back, but Fitzhugh had already given up insisting. He was holding a lady’s hand as she went over the rail into the lifeboat, and only Sal, who held the lady’s other hand, glanced back at her with that dark and impenetrable gaze.

Vida stalked the