Titanic by Diane Hoh

Author:Diane Hoh [Hoh, Diane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-4818-8
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Published: 2012-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

Sunday, April 14, 1912

At eleven-thirty on Sunday night, Elizabeth awoke suddenly. She couldn’t have said what had disturbed her sleep. The sound of her parents’ door slamming shut? A sudden, abrupt motion of the ship? Whatever it was, it yanked her out of a deep, disturbed sleep, and it took her several moments to clear her head.

She lay in bed listening to the distant vibration of the engines far below. The sound was like the steady beating of a heart. Without the rhythmic vibrations, she would have forgotten she was at sea.

It was icy cold in the cabin. Wrapping the coverlet around her shoulders, Elizabeth rose to a kneeling position to close the porthole over her bed.

The bed moved.

No, the bed couldn’t have moved. The bed was stationary, firmly affixed to the floor.

But there had been something. She’d felt it. Nothing alarming. No sound of a collision, no warning whistles shrilling. The lights were still on. The brass antique lamp on her nightstand was still in place, and the crystal pitcher of water beside it had jiggled only slightly.

Nothing in the cabin looked any different.

To Elizabeth, lying in bed on C deck, it felt as if the great ship had briefly stumbled in its smooth, easy glide across the water, the way someone trips over a small stone in the path while strolling in the woods. The person doesn’t fall, quickly regains his balance, and is on his way again, no harm done.

She expected the same thing to happen now. She expected the smooth glide to continue as before.

But before it could, Elizabeth heard what sounded like a giant, sharp fingernail being slowly scraped along the side of the ship. It reminded her of the way that annoying girl, Nina Chevalier, had tormented them at summer camp during the lectures on hiking safety held in the dining hall. Nina had long, pointed, scarlet nails and loved to drag them along the menu blackboard as they were leaving. The noise Elizabeth heard now was like that.

When that sound faded, there was a brief moment or two when Elizabeth listened and waited, with more curiosity than uneasiness.

And then the throbbing heartbeat far below died. Completely.

The porthole closed, Elizabeth sank back to a sitting position, the comforter still wrapped around her. Her first instinct was to rush into her parents’ room and ask them what had happened. But along with the sudden silence from the depths of the Titanic, there was also silence from her parents’ stateroom. She glanced at her locket-clock, lying on her bedside table. Not yet midnight. Her parents were still out, possibly having too much fun wherever they were to even notice that the engines had stopped.

Elizabeth remembered then what Max had said about the possibility of running into an ice field in the North Atlantic. “We’d have to stop for the night,” he had told her. “Too hard to negotiate icebergs in the dark.”

If the reason for the silent engines was an ice obstacle of some kind, Elizabeth wanted to see it.

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