“He did as you asked,” Vida said, pushing around Sal and not hiding at all her stricken expression. Camilla stepped backward, maneuvered herself behind Fitz. “But maybe you should have been straight with him about what you were doing. Then he might have known not to bring me here.”
Now she could see Fitzhugh Farrar’s famous map room and felt sad for herself and all female kind that they were made to pretend that this was a fun place to visit. The walls were paneled in dark wood, and the ceiling was carved wood, and on a large wood table many old papers were spread out. It was just like every uncle’s study. There was a painted globe, and a lot of leather-bound books, and a nook with a pair of large leather chairs and between them there was a glass tray with a set of crystal glasses and crystal bottle full of amber liquid. In the midst of all that solemn furniture stood the lovely Camilla, the wife of Fitzhugh’s brother, and Fitzhugh’s former fling. Or maybe not former. Vida was finding it difficult to make sense of the scene.
“We were—” Fitzhugh began.
But Vida couldn’t stand to hear an explanation and began to drown out his speech with her own: “I know what you were doing. Please. I am a lady. I really oughtn’t hear such things.” Why had she said that? It was precisely her unladylike behavior that had gotten her into this mess in the first place. She had acted too free, and now look at her. She’d behaved like all the other girls foolishly chasing after men who were indifferent to their efforts. And hadn’t a little part of her been hoping that maybe Fitz would kiss her, in the dark of this map room, just as he had apparently done with Camilla? It felt better to act indignant than to appear hurt, however, so she went on frowning as though this scene really had offended her delicate sensibilities.
“I have no idea what you are suggesting,” Camilla Farrar said. “Fitz is my brother.”
“Brother-in-law,” Vida corrected for some reason.
Camilla’s red-painted lips parted slightly in malice. Somehow the cruelty of that smile did nothing to diminish her beauty. “My,” she breathed. “Aren’t you well-informed?”
Of all the facts that now stabbed at Vida, Camilla’s cool dominance cut the deepest. In the years of her social career in San Francisco, Vida had never overplayed her hand so badly as now, had never had to face an adversary of higher social standing and more self-possession in quite so obvious a way. “Isn’t he?” was the only reply she could muster, and she knew it was the sort of weak and witless response that would repeat and repeat in her thoughts all night and all tomorrow like a torturous melody.
“We were only talking,” Camilla replied as she walked in a cloud of careless irritation past Vida and into the hallway. There she paused, revolved, and the way she gazed at Vida made Vida feel that all of her—her physical self, and also the high spirit she had believed herself to be—had been shrunk down to a pitiful nothing.
A little fire sparked in Vida’s belly. In the next moment she was aflame with anger. She let the heat build inside her, let it become a kind of tower. Any moment now, an absolute dagger of a rejoinder would occur to her. She knew it would. She waited for it, smiling at Camilla, facing her down as though they were two soldiers at a duel. Camilla smiled back, and Vida opened her mouth to let this woman know what a dangerous adversary she truly was.
Then Camilla was gone. Before Vida could manage to be astonished, she was struck by the sound—although it took several seconds for her to comprehend that what she was experiencing was a sound. It was so loud, for one thing, and also it was so many sounds at once. Somehow a scraping and a moaning and an echoing, and also the sound of a thousand wailing banshees, and also the wind, and also the complete absence of noise one might hear at the end of the Earth. She felt it deep in her belly and her skull as though she herself were a bell being tolled by whatever it was. She became aware that her feet were no longer on the ground, that she herself was almost floating. Then the wall (or the ceiling—she wasn’t sure which) smacked her left side, and for a moment her vision was a sparkling blur.
“What was that, what was that?” she heard Camilla shrieking from what sounded like not so far away.
“We’ve hit something.” That was Sal, and his voice was low and steady, which somehow made everything seem more frightening. “The ship hit something big.”
“Are you all right?” Fitzhugh asked, and his voice was so close that she knew the arms lifting her up must be his. Though she struggled against him, it was no use. That liar Fitzhugh, who made bright girls stupid, had snared her in his arms when she was too weak to protest.
Seven
How calm everything seemed for a while, and then never again.
Just after the world-ending sound and the shock of impact, Vida said she was all right, and would Fitzhugh please put her down, and he did. Camilla got up from wherever she had landed, and Sal approached the doorway, and they all stood there, very quiet, looking from one to the other with a hopeful question in their eyes—was it possible that they imagined it?
Then they heard the pounding of feet above, the shouting, and they knew they hadn’t imagined anything, that something had indeed happened. Wordlessly they followed Fitzhugh toward the exit to the promenade.
The oil paintings that had hung in the hall were now flung across the floor, and they could see, even before they arrived, that the door that had once led onto the promenade was gone. On the floor above them the shouting became more frenzied. They heard what sounded like a stampede of horses. They walked, as though compelled to do so, to what had once been the end of the hall. They stared out at what had once been the promenade—that wide, polished walkway that went all around the ship. A section of the promenade had been ripped away. They went to the edge, peered over into the abyss, and saw that it was not just a piece 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.