The Light in the Darkness 1 by Carla Louise Robinson

Author:Carla Louise Robinson [Robinson, Carla Louise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-03-31T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Five

Thursday, April 11th, 1912

Claire

Claire stared up at the enormous ship with trepidation and squeezed her niece’s hand tightly; she had never seen something constructed by man that was so prodigious before, and it frightened her a trifle, not that she would ever confess it. Claire liked to say that nothing disconcerted her, though that could not be further from the truth. In a sense, everything terrified her now. Nora’s parents – and consequently, Claire’s sister and brother-in-law – had died in hasty succession of each other. Claire’s brother-in-law had been killed in an accident at work; he’d been working on the shipyard when a pile of crates had been knocked and had fallen on him and three others. He had suffered for three days before he’d eventually passed, his lungs and ribs crushed, rendering him unable to breathe. It had been two years passed since her brother-in-law’s death; less than one since Shailagh’s.

Shailagh, Claire’s once-effervescent older sister, had then fallen into a profound desolation; as the sole breadwinner for an already destitute house was deceased, Nora’s immediate future solely depended on her mother. Morose though Shailagh was, she’d been a proud Irish woman, and she’d quickly returned to work in a textile factory, knowing it was necessary for her daughter’s survival, which superseded Shailagh’s personal feelings about the harsh, dangerous work. While some daughters could return home, that year their mother was dealing with death and sickness at every turn and could not pull herself out of her own melancholia.

Alas, Shailagh had managed to find service facilely by reason of the influenza epidemic, which she in turn promptly caught. Nora, who was only five, did not know to call for a doctor. By the time anyone knew of Shailagh’s condition, it was too late, with the fever taking her already weakened body, and Nora was now an orphan, having lost her parents before she’d barely scratched five.

Claire’s parents hadn’t recovered; Shailagh was the fifth child they had lost in three years. They feared that Ireland wasn’t the best place for them, and perhaps they were cursed, Papists living in a Protestant world. Claire’s family had long-suffered as a result; it was a double-edged sword; being Papist meant you believed Protestants were heretics, yet as you were the minority, Protestants were able to take from you, your rights stripped as you were paid less for the same work. Her parents had then decided to muster up all their savings to afford Claire and Nora a passage on any ship immigrating to England; a coal strike, and in Claire’s opinion, luck, saw them travel on the Titanic. Claire’s Ma and Da had hoped to follow, but it would take months, if not a year, for them to save for another voyage, and a lot could happen in such a period, as Claire well learnt.

After all, three winters prior, Claire had five siblings, not one. She had three older brothers, as well as a thirteen-year-old sister. One of her brothers had been

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