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Chapter Text

Part I: Tove

The morning air is still cool, the sun hanging low and dull over the horizon, but Tove is already sweating. She sways on her feet a little. Every time she thinks she has adjusted to the strange mass of her belly she grows larger still and her sense of balance is thrown off all over again. Ada, sweet girl, wraps an arm around her waist to steady her, while Krester grips her elbow tighter. For his sake or for hers, she cannot tell.

They are standing on the docks at Southampton, waiting for their turn to board the ship that will take them to America. Their quiet little family forms the still centre of a swirl of activity – shouted orders and sailors’ oaths and the splatter of refuse, women’s chatter and boys’ rapid footsteps and cargo crates thudding when they are dropped. In front of them, the black steel bulk of the Kerberos frightens Tove with its size even as it reassures her with its solidity. If she squints, she can make out the first-class passengers who are stepping onto the ship now. Most of them are dressed conservatively – the men in dark suits, the women in understated greys and creams – but every now and then there is a flash of colour: green brighter than the fields in summer, maroon as dark as blood. 

Before the sun reaches its zenith, they will be on their way to New York. New York. Tove has seen it on a map, once. She tries to imagine the Kerberos slicing through the vastness of the Atlantic, wonders if she will breathe easier once Europe is out of sight behind them. Unlikely. She thought the vice around her lungs would loosen once her feet were off Danish soil, but nothing changed inside her when they made it across the border into Germany, no more than it did when they reached France or when they crossed the channel into England. She still feels as though her head is only loosely attached to her body. She still cannot get enough air.

Beneath her heart, she can feel the baby stir. She imagines it stretching against its confines, using its newly formed limbs to feel for a way out. Don’t you dare come early. Don’t you even think about it, she thinks fiercely. Back home, the women always said that how you felt and what you thought while you carried your babies would leave a lifelong mark on them. When their mother carried Ada, Tove, still a child herself then, half-expected her sister to be born with an ashy thumbprint on her brow. Now, at nineteen, she thinks it all a lot of foolishness – but a part of her, the deeper, darker part that lies beyond the reach of reason, is convinced that the well of rage inside her has poisoned the baby as it grows. In her dreams it is a monster, scaly and clawed, that is coiled inside her belly, with sharpened silver spurs at its heels.

Her mother’s lips move in silent prayer. Her father studies his hands. Ada’s ears are pricked up and her eyes are bright as she tries to pick out the few English words that she knows from the uproar all around them. Krester picks at a splinter on their little silver-edged cross.

Seven days, Tove reminds herself. Seven days across the sea. 

With the intensity of a prayer, she conjures up an image of New York as she believes it must be – a vast, shining city into which she and Krester and Ada can simply disappear, and leave no trace.

Part II: Eyk

It has been two years, five months, and six days since the fire.

In the beginning, Eyk counted the hours. It is a sign of how far he has come, he supposes, that he is now merely counting days.

This voyage will add another seven days to his tally. More to the point, it will add seven late nights spent trying to drink enough whiskey to ward off the nightmares and seven pre-dawn mornings spent fighting his way out of unconsciousness, heart pounding, when the whiskey approach inevitably fails.

He is standing out of sight near the wheelhouse, staring determinedly at the horizon. If he does not look in the direction of the docks, then he will not see the first-class passengers who are boarding now, and if he cannot see the passengers, then he will not need to go greet them. (Sebastian tacitly understands that small talk is his job now.)

From the way the sound of footfalls on the gangplank changes – the sharp clicking of heels replaced by the soft shuffle of leather soles – he knows they have finished boarding first class and have now moved on to third. He hears a girl’s voice, bright and animated, rise above the rest, speaking a language that sounds almost like German but is not – and before he can stop himself, he has turned towards the sound.

She looks nothing like Nina, of course. Why would she? The speaker is a diminutive Scandinavian girl, her black dress fading to grey, the hair wrapped around her head so blonde it is nearly white. He tears his eyes away.

Seven days, he reminds himself. Seven days across the sea. Seven days to hold over sixteen hundred lives in his hands and hope he does better by them than he did by his daughters.

Part III: Maura

Maura should not be traveling on her father’s steamship. But none of the other ships leaving Southampton for New York this week have tickets left – or at least not ones they are willing to sell to a well-dressed woman travelling alone – while the Kerberos is nearly one-third empty and not in a position to turn away good money.

Her father never did have much business sense.

What Henry Singleton does have, however, is a formidable temper. Absently, Maura sits down on the bed in her cabin and rubs her wrist where he gripped it hard enough to bruise. The marks have faded somewhat, but the memory of his rage when she told him she was leaving is still fresh.

She knows she has disappointed him greatly. As a child she enthralled him with her precociousness, and he encouraged her interest in science when most fathers would have pulled her away from her books and made her mind her embroidery. He was proud that she studied medicine; under other circumstances, he would have been thrilled to see her heading off to New York, where the medical women movement is well ahead of its British counterpart. But in the wake of a miscarriage and a broken engagement, her leaving will mean a scandal that is beyond even her father’s power to contain.

She presses her hands against her belly, imagining a knot of scar tissue there where her womb should be. She knows the image is false, that the damage is not nearly so extensive. But the result is the same – no husband, no child, a father who cannot stand the sight of her.  

Seven days, she reminds herself. Seven days across the sea. Once she is in New York she will be beyond his reach, and then she can begin anew.

Part IV: Olek

Olek was hired to work aboard the Kerberos less than twenty-four hours ago, and in that time his English vocabulary has quadrupled to include phrases such as “Just do as you’re bloody told” and “Stop asking goddamned questions.”

The ship is still docked, but even so, it is so crushingly loud below deck that he cannot hear himself think. That is for the best, since stillness means remembering: a trail of blood and oil across a snowy side street, his brother’s hand – identical to his own, down to the colour of the veins and the shape of the fingernails – turning stiff and cold. If he pauses in his work long enough to catch his breath, then the postcard in his pocket seems to burn against his leg like a brand. So, he does not pause.

He is currently busy carrying sacks of something from one side of the engine room to the other. He has only the vaguest idea of their purpose, or, more fundamentally, of how the steamship works at all. But he is not about to ask. He knows how lucky he is to have found this job – he, with his broken German and his nearly non-existent English, with no references and no belongings aside from the clothes on his back. This job will carry him further and further away from Bóbrka, which is all he really cares about at the moment – and as a bonus, he likes his fellow coal stokers, despite the casually dismissive way they treat him; they seem to regard their circumstances with a certain wry humour that Olek wishes he could emulate.

Seven days, he reminds himself. Seven days across the sea. In New York, where he can simply vanish into the crowds, he will be able to stop looking over his shoulder.

Chapter Text

Part I: Tove

The baby has not stirred all day.

When she boarded the ship yesterday, Tove thought she knew what to expect. She realized, of course, that the steerage passengers would be confined to narrow berths in what was once a cargo hold, tucked below the main deck, and that there would be little light and no privacy. But somehow, she was not prepared for just how cramped and oppressive their quarters are, or how close they are to the waterline, or how much worse her nausea is now that she has the rolling of the ship as well as her pregnancy to contend with. She is lucky that the crew at least allowed her and Krester to stay with Ada and their parents in the section of the ship meant for families; originally, Krester was supposed to sleep among the single men and Tove among the strictly segregated single women. They had to lie and claim they were only sixteen. The bulky, brutish-looking officer with the blemished face who barred their entrance to the hold looked unconvinced, but he let them pass in the end.

Now, she sits on the edge of her bunk and picks at the coarse brown bread roll that she could not bring herself to eat at breakfast. The porthole above her emits a shaft of harsh white light that, despite its brightness, does little to illuminate anything; she can barely make out the row of bunks opposite.

She manages the first bite of the roll, and the second. The third sticks in her throat, and she has to run to the small washroom at the far end of the hold to empty her stomach again. There is little left for her to expel except for the few scraps of bread and bile. She has not managed to keep down anything at all since the ship fired its engines yesterday – and it is not as if she was eating much to begin with.

Thinking that her mad dash across the ship might have woken the baby from its stupor, she presses her hand against her belly, searching for an answering kick. The baby does not oblige her. Instead, she is seized by a sharp cramp, and when she lifts aside her skirts, she can see that her shift is spotted with blood.

She is surprised by the raw force of her panic. I never wanted you to die, she thinks. I just wanted you out of me.

She tears a strip from the hem of her shift and uses it to soak up the blood. Please, she whispers silently. Please come back. There is someone knocking insistently on the washroom door now; she does not have much time. Still, she makes sure that there is no trace of blood or vomit on the floor and that her face is wiped clean of fear before she leaves the room. If this is how her pregnancy ends, then in God’s name, she at least wants to avoid having an audience for it.

When she returns to her bunk, Krester and Ada are crouched at its foot, playing some sort of complicated game involving Ada’s doll and all their cutlery.

“Er du sulten?” Ada asks, pulling a small wedge of hard cheese from her apron pocket and tossing it to Tove with a grin. “For dig.” Tove smiles back for what feels like the first time in an age. When they were still on land, cheese was one of the easiest things for her to keep down. Of course, Ada has saved her own portion for her.

She takes small, careful bites. She almost makes it through the whole wedge.

Then: the washroom again. More bile. Black spots dancing in threes across her vision. The last thing she remembers is Krester pounding on the door; she tries to tell him to stop, that the noise is hurting her head, but she cannot make her voice work. It is almost a relief when everything goes black.

When she wakes, she is in bed again, propped up on Krester’s rolled-up blanket. Ada and her parents are clustered around her; the low hum of her parents’ praying is strangely comforting to her.

“Hvor er Krester?” is the first thing that comes out of her mouth. It is a bad sign that he is not here. Ada opens her mouth to answer, but she does not get the chance: Krester has appeared in the doorway and is coming towards them, a red-haired woman following close behind.

“Jeg tog en læge med,” he tells Tove. It sounds like an apology. “Jeg vidste ikke, hvad jeg skulle gøre.”

The word doctor makes Tove think of florid, corpulent men with mutton chops, but the woman who steps forward is slight and pale and young enough to have babies of her own.

“How long have you been pregnant?” she says. From the way the woman’s voice rises at the end of the sentence, Tove knows she is being asked something, but she cannot guess what. She thinks back to the evenings she and Ada spent bent over an English language primer that a kindly schoolteacher somewhere in western Germany lent them – but none of the words she just heard are familiar.

The woman tries again, voice lower and more intense now. “How many months have you been pregnant?” Many. It sounds a bit like mange. How many, hvor mange. But she cannot make out the rest. “Six months? Seven?” the woman persists. Those are numbers, Tove knows, although she cannot be sure which ones.

Ada realizes what the woman is asking before Tove does. “Syv måneder,” she says quickly, holding up seven fingers.

The woman’s brow creases in what looks like concern. She unbuttons Tove’s dress and pulls aside her shift to reveal the white, swollen mass of her belly and presses her hands against it at different angles. Tove hears her mother’s disapproving intake of breath, but if she has complaints, she does not voice them. The woman’s movements are swift and sure, and Tove, despite herself, relaxes slightly under her touch.

“Den er død,” she tries to tell the woman, even though she knows she cannot understand. She gestures shakily over her belly, trying to evoke movement and then stillness. “Babyen er død.”

The woman says something under her breath that Tove does not catch. She grabs a glass from the nearest table and presses its open side against Tove’s belly before lowering her ear toward it. A small smile forms on her face.

“I can hear its heartbeat,” she says. She taps her fingers above her left breast in a particular rhythm – two beats and a pause, two beats and a pause. A heartbeat. “It seems small and still for its age, but it’s certainly still alive.” Tove feels a flood of emotions too complex to name sweep through her.

Gently, the woman grips Tove’s chin between two fingers and tilts her face towards the light. Tove can only imagine how she must look. “Have you been able to eat? Have you been drinking enough?” She points towards the glass, tilts it towards her mouth to indicate drinking.

Tove shakes her head, tries to come up with a gesture to indicate vomiting.

“I see,” the woman says. For the first time, she looks around her, at the closely spaced rows of bunks and the sunken faces of the small children playing on the floor nearby. “And I imagine the food you get here is enough to turn anyone’s stomach.” Her mouth tightens in frustration. “Wait here,” she says. She points at the doorway that leads up to the main deck and then back to where she is standing now. “I’ll be back. Give me twenty minutes.” She hesitates for a moment, then pulls a small golden watch from her pocket and hands it to Ada, indicating where the minute hand will be when she returns. Ada smiles at her adoringly.

A woman doctor, calm and competent – they will never hear the end of this from Ada.

Once the woman is gone, Ada sits down on the edge of Tove’s bed and shows her the polished watch face, the soothing even ticking of its golden second hand. It is probably the most expensive thing she has ever touched.

Their father leads their mother away, and Krester follows them. Tove is grateful for the space. She rebuttons her dress and Ada nestles in close to her. Together, they settle down to wait.

Part II: Maura

Maura is more than a little out of her depth here.

She is no obstetrician; her knowledge of pregnancy and childbirth comes from the chatter of the midwives who trained at the same hospital where she studied, her own miscarriage, and basic common sense. Right now, she is relying mostly on the latter.

Once she has made it up the staircase from steerage and out onto the main deck, she pauses at the railing to take in gulps of fresh cool air. The air downstairs was sour and stifling; it is no wonder that that poor pregnant girl has ended up so dehydrated within the space of a single day.

Before she has fully caught her breath, she is interrupted by a man’s voice, subdued and gravelly, coming from behind her. “Haben Sie sich verlaufen?”

She startles; his approach has been too quiet for her to hear. She does not know what he just asked her, but she can guess. “I didn’t see you there,” she says, instead of answering, as she turns toward him.

He is not what she would have expected from his voice: tall and wiry, with dark hair swept back from an angular face and three diagonal scars across forehead and cheekbones that somehow enhance these features instead of marring them. He wears a greatcoat whose buttons are emblazoned with her father’s company’s symbol, and he moves with a quiet authority when he latches the gate that she left open behind her.

“You’re the captain,” she realizes. He does not bother to acknowledge it. He looks young for the job – not that she would know much about steamship captains – but he has the eyes of a much older man.

“What were you doing down there?” His English is accented but unhesitating and grammatically perfect.

Before she can think better of it, she responds sharply: “I don’t really see how that’s any of your business.” She regrets it almost immediately. She could use him on her side if she wants to help the pregnant girl downstairs.

“Passengers from first class aren’t allowed down there. There are rules on this ship, and they shouldn’t be challenged.”

Well, now that she has challenged him, she might as well commit to it. “Whose made those rules and to whose benefit were they put in place?” To her surprise, the corner of his mouth twitches up into a half-smile. She feels inordinately pleased with herself at that. “They’re certainly not benefiting the pregnant girl downstairs who needed medical help that only a doctor traveling in first class could provide her.”

The captain’s face softens slightly. “I see,” he says. “What was wrong with her?”

“Dehydration. Nausea from pregnancy and seasickness – it’s not a good combination. She needs saltwater.”

“Saltwater?” He looks alarmed. Of course, Maura realizes – anyone who works at sea has had it drilled into them to never drink saltwater no matter the circumstances.

“Clean water mixed with salt and sugar,” she clarifies. “One teaspoon of salt and eight teaspoons of sugar per litre of water. And fresh ginger if I can find it. And some bread that’s more palatable than what they have down in steerage.”

He nods slowly. “I’ll walk you down to the galley,” he says. “I was heading in that direction anyway. Our cook can give you what you need.” Abruptly, he strides away from her without pausing to check if she is following.

“Captain, if I might make another request?”

He gestures for her to go ahead.

“I was wondering if you could lend me a German speaker?”

“A German speaker?”

“The girl downstairs is Danish, I believe, and we don’t have a language in common. I need a translator, or it will be difficult for me to explain what to do with the saltwater solution. German and Danish are similar, are they not?”

His nod is noncommittal – more a tilt of the head, really. “I will come with you myself, then.”

Now it is her turn to be surprised. “Surely you have other things you should be doing?”

“Not unless a storm starts up,” he says curtly. “It will be easier for me to come than to spare somebody else.”

That does not sound right to Maura, but she decides not to question it. “Very well,” she says. “Shall we?”

The cook does not have fresh ginger, but he does provide her with candied ginger, a loaf of soft white bread, and a stack of crackers; he also lets her mix two litres of salted, sugared water and provides her with bottles and a spoon. One of the kitchen boys helps her wrap everything in napkins and tuck it into a basket for her to carry. Throughout all this, the captain stands silently in the doorway. Maura is grateful to him, of course – it would be much more difficult to coax all of this from the cook without the captain’s presence to pressure him – but she also cannot make out his motivations.

Perhaps he is simply bored – he must have made this very crossing countless times, after all. But for some reason – perhaps because of how intently he is watching her – Maura does not think that is the reason.

Once she has her provisions, the captain leads her through a dizzying maze of hallways and stairwells until they arrive back at the steerage quarters. The passengers there grow silent at the captain’s appearance, which he ignores entirely.

They follow the narrow corridor between the rows of bunks down to the pregnant girl’s bedside. Her eyes widen when she sees the captain, and she struggles to sit upright.

“Sprichst du Deutsch?” he asks her.

Her eyes are wide and mistrustful. Her answer, when it comes, seems reluctant. “Ein bisschen.”

The conversation goes slowly: Maura tells the captain that the girl should drink the water one spoonful at a time and suck on the ginger candies in between, and that she should try to eat bits of the bread and crackers throughout the day, starting before she gets out of bed, and that she needs calm and rest. He repeats her instructions in what even Maura can tell is slow, simplified German, carefully enunciated to make it easier for the girl to understand. The girl asks a few questions, haltingly, for the captain to translate, and then they repeat the process.

Finally, Maura is satisfied that Tove – she knows the girl’s name now – understands what to do and that her brother knows where to find Maura if her condition does not improve. Maura gives what she hopes is a reassuring smile and turns to leave, but Ada tugs at her sleeve to stop her. The little girl holds out her palms, the gold pocket watch cradled between them like a strange insect. “Keep it,” Maura says, and closes Ada’s fingers around it to make her meaning clear. The watch was a gift from Daniel; it will be better if she leaves it behind.

Maura has taken several steps towards the exit by the time she realizes that the captain is not following her. He is hesitating by Tove’s side, and as Maura watches, he says something to her in German, his voice too quiet for Maura to hear even from just a few feet away. Tove shakes her head, and the captain speaks again, more insistently. Their conversation seems too polite to qualify as an argument, but it is clear they are disagreeing about something. Finally, the captain nods, satisfied, and Tove slumps back against the rolled-up blanket she is using as a pillow.

“What was that about?” Maura asks as they climb the staircase that leads up to the main deck.

“I want her to move into one of the empty cabins. She won’t feel the rocking of the ship as much there, and the air is better. I’ll send one of my men down shortly to escort her.”

Once again, he has surprised her.

They part ways on the main deck, with the captain heading back to the bridge and Maura to her cabin.

Once she is inside with the door locked behind her, she searches through the desk for her ticket or the ship’s daily bulletin – anything that would have the captain’s name on it. She never paid attention to it before. She finally finds what she is looking for on her copy of the dinner menu for that evening.

“Eyk Larsen,” she reads out loud. It feels like a puzzle piece slotting into place.

Part III: Eyk

It is only after he has excused himself from the British doctor and returned to the bridge that Eyk realizes he never asked her for her name. He has to ask Sebastian if he remembers which cabin the red-haired woman travelling alone is assigned to – Sebastian does remember, because Sebastian remembers everything, and he answers Eyk’s decidedly odd question without any visible judgement – and then look her up on the passenger list. Maura Franklin. It suits her.

When he sees her out on deck again later that evening, he thinks at first that he is imagining her. With her red hair illuminated by the setting sun, she looks almost as if she is burning.

She should be in the dining room, where dinner is currently being served, but if he is being honest with himself, he does not join her at the railing to remind her of the ship’s meal schedule. He simply wants to talk to her.

“Everyone else is inside having dinner,” he says by way of greeting. “And you? Are you not hungry?”

“Just not hungry for another conversation about the weather, the decline of the empire, or the fact that I’m a woman traveling alone,” she says lightly. She is wrapped in a dark cloak but otherwise seems unbothered by the biting cold or the way the wind is picking up. When he turns to look at her, he sees that she is half-smiling as she looks out at the ocean. It emboldens him.

“Half my crew is talking about having a woman on board who studied medicine,” he tells her. “You’re quite an unusual person, Miss Franklin.”

She lets out a small sound that does not quite qualify as a laugh. “I guess Mrs. Wilson was right. Rumours do travel fast.” The name Mrs. Wilson is not familiar to him, but the type of woman Miss Franklin is describing certainly is.

Miss Franklin tilts her head and meets his gaze evenly. “Do you know that there are just as many rumours about you on this ship as there are about me?”

No doubt there are. For the second time that day, he finds that he is smiling. For a moment, Miss Franklin simply considers him; when she finally does return his smile, it changes her whole face. The sun sinks lower, painting the grey-blue surface of the ocean with streaks of purple and orange.

“Right down here, the ocean has a depth of almost four thousand meters,” he tells her, mostly just to have something to say. “I expect that within our lifetimes, man will map out every corner of this world – go to the farthest deserts, the top of the highest mountains. But what’s down there, I think that will remain a mystery.”

“Are you familiar with Emily Dickinson’s work?”

This is, once again, not the response he was expecting. “Not particularly,” he admits.

Her gaze is fixed on the waves below them. “The Brain is deeper than the sea—/For—hold them—Blue to Blue—/The one the other will absorb—/As sponges—Buckets—do—” she recites evenly.

He opens his mouth to speak but finds he has no words.

“I think you’re right about the ocean. But I think what’s inside here” – she reaches out to tap his temple – “will remain an even bigger mystery, and for longer still.”

Part IV: Olek

On the evening of his first full day at sea, Olek wraps his meagre dinner rations in a napkin and slips away from the crowd of his colleagues to find a quiet corner somewhere. The noise and the bustle may help keep his thoughts at bay, but they are also starting to make his head spin. He has never gone this long without fresh air before; they did not have much in his village, but they did have that, and plenty of it.

Through trial and error, he finds his way to a small, covered deck that contains little except for a lifeboat and its rigging. It has only three walls; in place of the fourth is an opening in the hull of the ship that looks out over a precipitous drop into the ocean. He sits on the edge of the floor with his legs hanging over the side and eats his bread and dried meat slowly.

The sunset is nearly complete. The sky’s vibrant colours are fading to navy, and the stars are coming out.

Olek is not sure if he believes in God anymore, but in this gently growing darkness, saying a quiet prayer for Józef and Magda seems like the right thing to do. He prays that Józef is resting peacefully. He prays that Magda finds a way to move on, as Olek himself is trying to do.

Chapter Text

Part I: Olek

The sunrise finds Olek on the lifeboat deck again, eating a dried apple for breakfast with one hand and keeping hold of his postcard with the other. He has folded and unfolded it so many times by now that the paper is starting to give way along the seams; he will have to start taking more care with it if he wants to keep it in one piece.

If he ever met its sender, he cannot remember it – although they share a given name and grew up in the same small village. The other Olek was Józef’s friend, not his. It was Józef to whom he wrote the postcard, inviting him to stay with him and his family in Brooklyn; it was Józef who was supposed to make this trip. Józef was supposed to train as a teacher in America and find a job, a good job, and then send for Magda to join him, and Olek did not begrudge him any of it. From the time they were born, his brother was always a little stronger, a little cleverer, a little quicker to make friends than Olek was. They shared the same face, but Józef’s was always lit by a slightly brighter smile. So when Józef got the chance for a new life, a better life, in America, it seemed only right and proper that Olek should stay behind.

It is strange, he thinks, how things work out sometimes. Józef is gone and he, his brother’s simulacrum, is the one who remains, like a moon spinning around the space where the Earth once was.

The footsteps behind him are so light that they are almost carried away by the wind altogether – but Olek notices them just in time. The man who caused them, Olek sees, is dark-skinned, short, and compact; he wears an ill-fitting crewman’s uniform and stands as if he is expecting a blow to land on him at any moment.

“Przepraszam,” Olek says quickly, scrambling to his feet. No one has explicitly told him if he is allowed to be here, but it seems safe to assume that he is not. “Entschuldigen Sie. I’m sorry.” Once he has exhausted his multilingual store of apologies, he looks at the man more closely and sees that his feet are bare. It explains why his approach was so quiet, of course, but it also suggests that while Olek may be out of place here on the lifeboat deck, this man does not belong on the ship at all.

“Reste,” the man says, extending a hand as if to a skittish animal. “Reste là. Je vais pas te faire de mal. J’ai faim.”

Olek realizes the hand is not reaching for him – it is reaching for the rest of his breakfast. He looks down at the napkin he is holding: the apple is gone, but he still has most of his bread ration. Wordlessly, he extends it toward the man.

As if some dam has been broken, his visitor stumbles forward to seize the food so quickly that Olek fears for a moment he might trip over the edge of the deck. But he regains his footing just in time and makes quick work of the bread.

“Ton nom?” he asks. “C’est quoi, ton nom?”

Olek hesitates.

“Moi, c’est Jérôme,” the man says. A trade. “Et toi?”

“Olek,” Olek offers in return. Jérôme’s desperate face relaxes slightly – as if he knows somehow, just from that small conversation, that Olek is not going to turn him in. Stowaway or no, they have exchanged names and shared a meal now. And whatever Jérôme’s reasons are for being here, they are unlikely to be worse than Olek’s own.

There are worse foundations to build a friendship on.

Part II: Maura

When Maura returns to her cabin after breakfast, she finds Ada seated cross-legged by the door, patiently waiting for her. The girl practically jumps to her feet at Maura’s approach.

She is wearing the same greying black dress with the severe high collar that she had on yesterday, but her face has been scrubbed clean and her plaited white-blonde hair is shining from a recent wash. Maura’s heart aches for her a little.

“Jeg vil lære at tale engelsk,” she says. “Vil du lære mig?”

Her voice is so eager, and her eyes are so wide. Maura assumes that she is asking to be taught English – and even if it is something else that she wants, there is little she can do for the girl until they are at least able to exchange a few sentences.

“Come in,” she sighs. Her cabin is neat and spare; she has been careful to leave no trace of herself here. But Ada seems to find a great deal in it to fascinate her – the heavy velvet curtains, the strange, disconcerting painting of a pyramid that hangs beside the door.

On her desk, an anatomy textbook lies open to an illustration of the human head in cross-section, its parts labelled in spidery Latin. Other than her neurology texts, the only reading material she has with her is a novel that has promptly put her to sleep every time she has tried to read it. What do nine-year-old girls like to read anyway? Even discounting the language barrier, nothing on her desk seems in the least appropriate.

She is getting ahead of herself. They are starting from the very basics, after all. She settles for a few blank sheets of paper and a pencil stub, which she stuffs into her pocket.

“Come with me,” she says.

They find an unobtrusive spot on the main deck where they can sit on the floor with their papers between them. In most settings the sight of them together – an unmarried woman dressed in the fine silk and linen of a first-class passenger, side by side with a little girl in ragged homespun – would raise concerns and then complaints, but no one bothers them all morning; Maura suspects that the captain has told his men to leave them be.

They start their language lesson with greetings and pleasantries; once Ada can politely introduce herself and all the members of her family, they move on to numbers, to asking for directions, to naming the foods one might find at the market. Ada learns quickly, and once she has committed something to memory, she seems never to forget. Maura thinks back to the primers she had when she was a child learning to read, to the lists of simple words that she painstakingly wrote out, a single wobbly letter at a time. Fly, lie, pat, eat, use, may, see, say. The pot, the tea, the air, the sea. She sounds them out for Ada as they come back to her, devises little sketches on her scraps of notepaper to indicate their meaning until Ada’s eyes light up in understanding. Before noon, Ada can name everything she sees.

Maura knows little of children. Her brother is childless, and her extended family is small; her loose circle of friends back in England consisted mostly of women on the edge of spinsterhood like she herself is. She has no way of knowing if it is normal for a child to be as sharp and as alert as Ada is – she rather thinks not – but still, keeping her engaged is so easy, and her eagerness is so infectious, that Maura feels a long-suppressed ache permeate her very pores. If her own child had lived, would it have been like this – every feeling heightened, and everyday objects alight with possibility, just waiting to be newly discovered?

Ada grins at her, and Maura smiles back.

“Let’s try something a little more complicated,” she suggests. She remembers how Ada’s parents had prayed so intently over Tove’s bedside; the child probably knows her Bible, she decides. “Do you know this one?”

Maura herself has not so much as cracked open a Bible since her mother died, when she was probably no older than Ada is now. Her mother was the religious one; her father has no patience for churchgoing, and growing up Maura followed his lead in this as she did in most things. She recites the only text she still remembers, simplifying and modernizing it as best she can: “Behold, you desire truth in the depths of the heart, and in the hidden part of my heart you make me know wisdom. Purge me will hyssop, and I will be clean: wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.” She thinks that is mostly right.

Ada’s smile widens. “Du elsker jo Sandhed i Hjertets Løndom, så lær mig da Visdom i Hjertedybet. Rens mig for Synd med Ysop, tvæt mig hvidere end Sne,” she says in recognition. Hjert, Visdom, Ysop: the connections are clear even to Maura, who does not – it has become clear over the course of this morning – have the mind for languages that Ada does.

“Yes, exactly. I always liked that one.” Maura writes out the English text on one of their remaining sheets of notepaper, and Ada adds in the Danish version beside each line. Together, they connect each word to its counterpart; it is not an exact translation, so some words are left unpaired, and they work through those one by one. Maura tries to think of a good explanation for purge and an example of depth that is not lifted directly from her conversation with the captain last night.

The hours slip away as easily as water down an overflowing stream, and morning shifts into afternoon without either of them noticing.

Part III: Tove

When Tove finally wakes, her newly assigned cabin is awash with the golden light of late morning or early afternoon. She has not slept so late in years – perhaps ever. But up here in First Class, the rocking of the ship is more soothing than nauseating, and there are no pre-dawn arguments to overhear and no chores to complete before breakfast.

The lateness of the hour is the first thing she notices; the fact that she is alone in the cabin is the second. She sits upright in a panic. When she fell asleep last night Ada was curled against her back, but now there is no sign of her save for the small second indentation in the pillow; her dress is gone from where it hung over the back of the chair and her shoes are no longer lined up next to Tove’s by the door.

You were not supposed to let her out of your sight, she castigates herself frantically. Her mother did not want her and Ada to leave steerage, warning them that the wealthy travellers upstairs had loose morals and were unused to being denied. Tove had to promise her that they would stick together, avoid eye contact, speak to no one, and in the end, her mother relented, if only for the baby’s sake.

Tove’s breathing is shallow as she buttons on her dress, braids back her hair, and laces up her boots – the latter no small feat with her belly as swollen as it is these days. As she rushes through the maze of velvet-carpeted hallways, she silently rehearses what she will say if she is accused of trespassing: Ich darf hier sein. Der Kapitän sagte es. Ich darf hier sein. Her German is barely serviceable in the best of times; she needs to make sure that the words will not slip away from her entirely if someone from the crew challenges her.

She checks the dining room first, then the upper deck where the first-class passengers promenade peacefully. No sign of Ada. Her back is starting to ache; she is too far along to be running like this. Her plan is to go down to steerage next to ask Krester if he has seen any sign of their sister, then to find her way to the bridge to beg the captain for his help.

In the end, she does not need to do either. When she bursts onto the main deck, she is met by the sound of Ada’s laughter, light and clear as a bell. Her heart is still pounding from a heady mix of panic and exertion as she follows the sound around a corner and finds the sight to match: two heads bent close together, one pale blond, one bright red.

“Ada!” she cries out. Fear gives way to relief and then, just as quickly, to white-hot rage. She grabs Ada’s hand, tugs her clumsily to her feet. “Hvad laver du? Hvad fanden laver du her?”

Any look of guilt on Ada’s face is counteracted by the stubborn set of her jaw. “Maura hjælper mig,” she says, trying unsuccessfully to twist her hand free. “Bare rolig.”

“Du skræmte mig,” Tove hisses. “Gør aldrig det igen.”

The red-haired doctor has risen to her feet as well. She looks distinctly uncomfortable as she smooths out her skirts. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t realize. I assumed you knew where she was.”

Tove can recognize an apology when she hears one, no matter what language it comes in, but right now, she is simply too angry to care. “Hold dig fra os! Hold dig væk!” If she stays out here any longer, she thinks she might cry. She adjusts her grip on Ada's arm and makes to head back inside with her sister in tow.

She is not looking where she is going, so she nearly slams bodily into the captain when she turns.

“Was ist hier los?” When he spoke to her yesterday, his voice was gruff but mild; now, it carries a distinctly authoritative edge, and Tove finds herself cowed.

“Undskyld,” she all but whispers. She catches herself, searches for the right German words. “Es tut mir leid. Ich wusste nicht, wo meine Schwester war. Ich hatte Angst.”

The doctor – Maura – steps forward, speaking to the captain in English far too low and rapid for Tove to hear. Freed from the need to speak, Tove can simply study the two of them: the way the captain’s face has gone bloodless beneath his weather-worn skin, so that his scars stand out in stark relief; how Maura stands perhaps a half-step too close to him, almost near enough for her fingers to brush against his wrist.

Eventually, the captain offers Tove his arm and walks her back to her cabin. “Du brauchst Ruhe,” he reminds her. Ada, trailing behind them, makes no secret of her disappointment. She drags her feet, quite literally, scuffing her soles against the carpet.

Once they are back in their room, Tove wraps her arms around her sister and holds her close enough to hear her heartbeat. “Undskyld,” she whispers into her hair. Ada squirms at first, but eventually she squeezes back – she has never been able to hold a grudge for long. Tove is torn between wanting to preserve Ada’s fearlessness and needing to tell her just how unforgiving the world out there can be.

Part IV: Eyk

It seems quieter than it should be in the captain’s cabin, as if all the air has been sucked out of it by some unseen hand so that the sounds of the steamship have nothing left to travel through, leaving Eyk as isolated as the unheard bell in Robert Boyle’s glass jar.

Or perhaps it is just the whiskey.

It takes a minute for the rapping at the door to register, and another for Eyk to be certain he is not simply imagining the first clear sound he has heard since he retreated here this afternoon. He makes sure to tuck his flask away into a desk drawer before he rises – there is no need for his men to discover quite how bad his drinking has become.

But it is not Franz or Sebastian at the door; it is Miss Franklin, her finely formed, elfin face so pale she is practically glowing.

“May I step inside?” Her voice is gentler than he remembers it being yesterday. Without waiting for an answer, she makes to squeeze past him into the room, so that he is all but forced to step aside for her.

“Passengers shouldn’t be in this part of the ship either,” he tells her drily; he feels he should at least acknowledge the impropriety of their meeting behind closed doors like this, even if he is not expecting his words to have the slightest effect. Miss Franklin does, in fact, ignore him. Her eyes fall on the scattered papers on his desk, and from the slight shift in her posture he can tell the exact moment when she notices the silver-framed portrait of his family. There is something disconcerting about it, he knows – perhaps it is the intensity of Nina’s gaze, or the way that the camera caught Sara just as she was starting to turn away from it, as if someone called her name right before the shutter closed.

“I wanted to make sure you were all right,” she says as she turns to face him. “Earlier, you seemed…” She searches for the right word. “Affected.”

He is not sure he could explain it if he tried. “I worry about that family,” he tells her – the most neutral explanation he can find.

Miss Franklin’s expression does not change in any obvious way, but he can tell that she is not convinced, and for some reason he cannot name, he feels compelled to continue.

“I’m sure you’ve heard the rumours. My daughters died in a fire almost two and a half years ago, all three of them.” It takes some effort to force the words out, and yet it feels inevitable that he should tell her this, as if her mere presence is coaxing the thread of this story to unspool. “That little Danish girl reminds me of my eldest. Nina. Everything that happened on deck earlier, that girl thinking her sister was lost, it felt…close to home.”

Most people fall silent in the face of such grief. They withdraw from him, and he can hardly blame them. But there is something in Miss Franklin, he knows by now, that draws her towards that which others shy away from, like a compass needle pulled south instead of north. And so he is not as surprised as he should be, perhaps, by the gentleness with which she takes his hand, or by the intensity with which she listens to him.

“What were they like?” she asks, as if she somehow knows that this is exactly what he needed her to say.

“Nina was…an old soul, I think you would call her. She liked looking after people, and she noticed everything, and she had…such a clear way of seeing the world – it always surprised me, the way her mind worked. Sophie was shyer – or maybe she was just in Nina’s shadow, always following her lead. She had a bit of a temper, though” – he smiles to think of it now – “and she was very talented with her hands – sewing, painting, piano, anything like that, she was getting better at it every day. And Hanna, the little one, she was only six. Every time I saw her, she had changed so much.” He has never told anyone all this. He has not even spoken their names since they died. “My wife, Sara – for the last few years she was…frail. Her mind, I mean. I don’t know exactly when it started. She tried very hard to hide it and she managed for a long time. But eventually, there were whole hours, whole evenings when she would get confused – she would forget me and the children and think she was still a girl on her father’s farm, and it would upset her, being in a place she couldn’t remember. Or she would have these…spells of terror, convinced that one of the girls was drowning in the well or about to fall down the stairs, and she would be paralyzed with fear. I took her to doctors, of course, and they were so confident that all she needed was rest…”

For the first time, Miss Franklin’s restrained expression wavers; he notices how her mouth tighten, and he means to ask her about it, he really does, but the whole story is pouring out of him now, and he could not stop it if he tried.

“So we found a housekeeper to take over the running of the house and a governess for the children and Sara did everything the doctors said – the rich food, the best rest – and for a while she seemed to get better. And then one day, my ship had just docked in New York, half a world away, almost, and I got a telegram saying that the house, my family’s house, had burned down the night before.”

Miss Franklin waits, knowing that there is still more he needs to tell her. “There have been rumours that Sara set the fire on purpose, that she wanted herself and the children dead. But the police, the fire brigade, they all said it looked like an accident. That she probably had one of her spells and knocked over a lamp, or the rug caught fire, and she didn’t realize it until it was too late. And they told me…Nina’s room was on the ground floor. When the fire started, it was late, the girls would all have been in bed, and Nina should have been able to climb out of the window, save herself. But they told me they found her…remains in the attic next to Hanna’s. Somehow, she climbed all the way up there. I don’t know if she was trying to save her sister, or if she just didn’t want her to be alone in the end, or if it had nothing to do with the fire and she was upstairs for some other reason. I don’t know if it matters. None of them made it.”

Miss Franklin’s hand tightens around his. Her fingers are very warm, or perhaps his are just cold. “None of it was your fault,” she says, her voice no less fierce for its quietness. “You loved them well.”

It is his fault, though, because when they were newly married, Sara was always asking him to find a new line of work, one that would not take him away from home for weeks at a time, and he refused her so often that she eventually stopped asking, and she never brought it up again, not even when she really needed him. It is his fault, because he listened to the smug doctors in their fine suits and their polished offices and not to his daughter, who whispered to him that the progress Sara seemed to be making under their care was only surface-deep. It is his fault, because whatever his reasons, he was not there when it happened, and whichever way he turns it in his head, he knows he should have been.

“I’m sorry for your losses,” Miss Franklin says carefully, interrupting the spiral of his thoughts. In the distance, the ship’s bell rings, meaning that she is expected in the dining room and he in the wheelhouse to supervise the changing of the watch. But still, Miss Franklin seems in no hurry. She waits until his breathing has calmed before she releases his hand.

Chapter Text

Part I: Maura

Maura is still bleary-eyed from sleep when she enters the infirmary. The steward who brought her here was either unwilling or unable to tell her why he had to wake her before dawn; all he said, before he left her at the door, was that the captain needed her here immediately.

In the absence of any daylight coming through the portholes, the infirmary is so dimly lit that Maura pauses in the doorway to let her eyes adjust. The first thing she notices is that the operating table has been turned into an ersatz bier, with a tall, narrow body laid out on it and covered in a crisp white sheet. The second thing she notices is the captain, stepping toward her. Despite the earliness of the hour he is in full uniform, making Maura feel underdressed in the loose blouse and skirt she threw on over her nightgown.

“Thank you for coming so early, Miss Franklin.” He pauses. “Or is it Doctor? I apologize, I should have asked before.”

She is about to suggest he call her Maura and solve the problem that way when she realizes that they are not alone – two officers are standing against the back wall, both in shirtsleeves, both looking distinctly troubled. She clears her throat. “Miss is fine.”

“One of my men was found dead in his bed this morning,” he tells her, gesturing towards the body. “Eugen. We want to avoid causing a panic if possible. We were hoping you might be able to tell us what caused this, and if it is…catching.” 

Maura scrubs her hands clean in the basin on the nearest counter before drawing back the sheet. The face beneath looks peaceful and very, very young. “How old was he?” she asks.

It is the red-haired first mate who answers. “Twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. He was a good worker.”

That does not surprise her. The dead man looks like he would have worked hard, been eager to please. She tries to put that out of her mind as she searches the body for any sign of illness or injury. There is nothing obviously wrong with it – no bruises, no external bleeding, no broken bones. Certainly nothing to indicate foul play. “How was he yesterday? Did he seem ill at all? Different in any way?”

The captain and the first mate both shake their heads, but the hulking man with the perpetually bruised face speaks up. “He had a… Taubheitsgefühl,” he says, as if he is just now recalling it. “In his arms, yesterday. He kept dropping things.”

“Numbness,” the captain tells her.

Numbness. In the absence of other more obvious causes of death, it suggests a stroke. But for a young, healthy man to die so suddenly… “Are you sure it started yesterday? Is it possible he had symptoms for longer?”

“It may be possible,” the first mate says. “Eugen was well liked. If he was ill and he didn’t want us to know, others may have helped him hide it.”

Maura examines the skin of the dead man’s neck and chest more closely, sees the tiny red pinpoints, subtle against his fair skin, that trace along his sides. “I’ve seen this kind of rash before. It can be a sign that the veins are inflamed, and in rare cases, that can lead to serious neurovascular or cardiovascular problems. A stroke would be my best guess here. But it’s impossible to be sure without a full autopsy. His brain would need to be examined for haemorrhagic lesions.”

“Is that something you can do?”

She wants to. There are few things she loves as much as seeing a human brain reveal its secrets to her scalpel. No diagram can do it justice. But she cannot in good conscience dissect this poor dead sailor’s body while knowing full well that her results will carry no weight once they reach the shore. “Even if you had the necessary equipment here, I’m afraid I’m not qualified to conduct an autopsy. Women in England are allowed to study medicine, not practice it. You should take him to a morgue once we arrive in New York.”

The captain hesitates. His frown deepens. “How confident are you that he is not contagious?”

“I can’t be fully sure. Even if I could confirm that it was a stroke that killed him – that doesn’t rule out infectious causes. I’ve seen tuberculosis cases lead to strokes, possibly via persistent inflammation. It’s not well understood.”

“Then we need to dispose of the corpse. We’re not equipped to transport it safely to New York.”

It seems too cruel to send such a fragile young body into the crushing dark embrace of the sea. A depth of almost four thousand meters. Just the idea of the weight of all that icy water makes her shudder, but she can see the sense in the captain’s decision.

The captain is looking at her intently, as if he is expecting something more from her. “Is there anything else I can do?” she asks, out of real curiosity rather than politeness.

“No. Thank you again, Miss Franklin. We’ll let you return to sleep.”

She misses the weight of his gaze once it is gone.

Back in her cabin, Maura is too restless to consider sleeping, although the sun is barely beginning to rise. Instead, she decides to dress properly for the day, removing the skirt and blouse she chose blindly earlier that morning and trading her nightgown for a clean shift.

Her pregnancy and the long recovery from its bloody end have changed her body beyond recognition. She is thinner than she should be, save for the way her belly curves outward where once it was flat, and her stretch marks are no less obvious for having faded from purplish red to pink. During those weeks she spent in hospital and then in a convalescent home, drifting in and out of consciousness, she trained herself to think of her form as no more than a vessel to carry her brain from room to room. She has become quite good at it. Still, her body sometimes surprises her with the ways it makes itself known. A trickle of awareness down her sternum, a warmth building low in her core.

She shakes herself. No good will come of thinking that way. She finishes dressing quickly and then twists and pins her hair up and out of the way.

My name is Maura Franklin now, she reminds herself as she checks her reflection in the mirror to make sure the marks on her wrists are hidden by her sleeves. She has started doing this each morning, whispering the words out loud like a prayer. I’m no longer the woman I used to be. Today is October 21^st, 1899. I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy.

The captain trusted her enough to ask her to examine the body of a dead officer. He based his decision to dispose of the corpse on what she told him. He, for one, clearly believes that her mind is sound, and she holds onto that like a talisman as she steps away from the mirror.

Part II: Olek

Olek and Jérôme are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Since meeting Olek yesterday, Jérôme has traded his previous strategy of hiding in the coal bunkers for a new one of hiding in plain sight. This way, he at least gets fed at regular intervals, but still, trying to blend in among the crew brings new dangers: the others are mostly white Germans and Englishmen, so Jérôme would stand out even if it was not for his soldier’s stance or the awkward way he wears what Olek assumes is a stolen uniform. Worse still, Olek’s attempts to find a pair of shoes for him somewhere in storage have turned up nothing, so Jérôme, still barefoot, is breaking the ship’s regulations in obvious fashion as he carries spare pieces of rigging across the deck.

Olek is using his break to check on him when the officer with the blemished face stomps onto the deck and demands they both follow him. Olek would be worried that they have been found out, except he is fairly certain that the officer just picked the first two men he laid eyes on.

“Mitkommen!” the officer snaps, when Jérôme hesitates a second too long. “Und schnell.” They follow him down to what Olek assumes is the infirmary, a dark, spare room that contains little of note except for a man’s body wrapped in a kind of makeshift shroud.

“Werft die Leiche über Bord,” the officer tells them. Olek blinks, certain that he has misunderstood, but the officer nods at the body and then at the watery horizon that is just visible through the porthole, so there can be no confusion. “Stellt sicher, dass niemand euch sieht.” In his defense, he at least does not look happy about it.

For some reason, Olek imagines that the man beneath the shroud is not dead but merely paralyzed, and that he will scream silently as he sinks into the sea. He really, really does not want to touch him.

“Worauf wartet ihr?”

Olek tells himself he is being ridiculous and marches over to grasp the dead man’s legs. Jérôme mostly looks confused as he takes hold of the other side of the body.

It is slow going, dragging the dead man through the halls and up several staircases, ducking out of sight whenever they hear anyone approaching. The officer follows behind, making no effort to help but at least not rushing them either. Finally, they reach a deserted stretch of the main deck and heave the body overboard. The shroud comes loose as it falls, trailing behind like a flag of surrender. Olek turns away, but he still hears a splash and shudders.

“Zurück an die Arbeit,” the officer says, dismissing them. 

Jérôme freezes.

Olek hisses his name and grabs his arm, ready to haul him away. But then he realizes what has happened: the officer has noticed Jérôme’s bare feet, and where before his face was merely frustrated, it is now darkening with anger. 

For a moment, no one moves. Then Jérôme turns and runs. “Hey, du!” the officer shouts, and several crewmen come running at the sound, fists up and at the ready. “Hey! Haltet ihn!”

In the end, it takes four men to subdue Jérôme, who fights like the very devil despite Olek’s pleading with him to stop before he makes things worse for himself. The officer’s old injuries are reopened by several well-aimed punches, and one of the other crewmen has blood dripping down from a broken nose.

“Jemand stahl gestern eine Uniform.” The officer’s voice is strained, his breathing heavy. Jérôme, struggling against the hold the crewmen have on him, looks about ready to spit in his face. Don’t do it, Olek thinks at him. Don’t make it even worse. “Du weißt nicht zufällig, wer das war?” 

Jérôme just blinks blood out of his eyes. Olek has the distinct feeling that he regrets nothing.

The officer grips the stowaway’s face with blood-smeared hands. “Weißt du, was wir mit blinden Passagieren machen?”

Olek can guess.

Jérôme leaves a trail of blood across the deck as the crewmen drag him away. Olek is still searching through his limited German vocabulary for something, anything, to say that might help when he hears a woman’s voice cry “Stop!”.

The speaker is an elegant, wide-eyed woman whose silken skirts sweep the floor behind her. The equally well-dressed man at her side is more than a full head taller than she is, his face dominated by an impressive moustache. Reluctantly, the officer turns towards them. “This is not your business,” Olek hears him say before he follows the couple out of earshot.

The woman does most of the talking, Olek sees. She starts out pleading, and when that seems to get her nowhere, she turns imperious. She gestures several times toward Jérôme.

For the first time, Olek thinks he may regret the trouble he became mixed up in when he first shared his breakfast with Jérôme. All this while, Olek has assumed that his new friend is also impoverished and desperate, that he needed a new start enough to decide to stow away. But a wealthy couple mixing themselves into his affairs? That tells a different story altogether.

As the woman and the officer continue arguing, Olek searches his pockets for a handkerchief, finding a rag instead. He offers it to Jérôme, who jerks a hand free from his captors and takes it to wipe the blood and sweat from his face. The crewmen make no move to prevent it; they can see that something has changed.

How do you know those people? Olek wants to ask. Are they trying to help or hurt you?

“Laßt ihn los,” the officer finally orders. He wipes the blood from his own face roughly with his sleeve. “Zurück an die Arbeit. Und du” – he steps forward until his face is inches from Jérôme’s – “wenn du jeglichen Ärger verursachst, dann werde ich dich persönlich über Bord werfen.”

Olek doubts that Jérôme understands German, but the officer’s tone was clear.

“A teraz chodź,” Olek hisses, tugging Jérôme towards the pieces of rigging he was carrying into storage before this whole thing started. The officer watches them go, his bloodstained face unreadable. Olek looks over his shoulder for a last glimpse of the French couple, but they are already gone.

Part III: Eyk

When Wilhelm first tries to relay the news of Eugen’s passing back to the shipping company, everyone in the wheelhouse hears the dull thudding that results from his attempts to press the telegraph key instead of the sharp clicks and slight electrical buzzing that should accompany the motion. For a moment, no one speaks. First an officer simply failed to wake up this morning, then a stowaway was found, and now they have no way of reaching the shipping company, or even another nearby vessel, in case of an emergency. It feels like too much bad luck for one day.

Eyk spends the good part of the afternoon painstakingly taking apart the telegraph’s transformer and resonant circuits, examining each wire for any sign of fraying, searching for the component at fault. In the end, he realizes the problem is ridiculously simple: the spring has come loose from the telegraph key, rendering it temporarily useless. It takes all of five minutes to fix.

He has not felt so stupid in a long time, he thinks as he offers the telegraph operator’s seat back to Wilhelm. They are still close enough to Southampton, barely, to send one last message back to the shipping company. By the end of the day, Europe’s shores will be out of the reach of their telegraph, and any more news will have to wait until they are closer to North America.

The ticking stops. Wilhelm, his work done, looks up from the telegraph. “Es ist erledigt,” he confirms to Eyk.

Eyk is ashamed to admit he knows nothing of Eugen’s family, of the people whom the shipping company, now informed, will have to notify. The men who have joined his crew within the last two and a half years are mostly strangers to him – beyond their work ethic and the skills they have to offer, he knows them not at all.

“Ihr behaltet das für euch,” he warns all the officers on the bridge: Wilhelm, Franz, and Sebastian. Other than Miss Franklin, whose discretion he is confident he can count on, and the two men who disposed of the body under strict orders to stay silent, these men are the only people on the ship who know what happened this morning. Normally the ship’s bell would be rung eight times in honour of a dead sailor, but they are foregoing that tradition in the interest of keeping Eugen’s death quiet. It is a final indignity that Eugen does not deserve, but Eyk needs the rest of the voyage to be peaceful; he wants no rumours of a curse making its way through the crew and stirring their blood.

All three of the men nod their agreement, although Franz, in particular, does not look happy about it. Franz leaves to check on the crew in the engine room, and Wilhelm to walk the deck, leaving Sebastian alone by Eyk’s side.

“Lade Miss Franklin zum Abendessen am Kapitänstisch ein,” Eyk tells Sebastian once it is just the two of them. “Heute Abend.”

Sebastian does not actually need to remind him that it is hardly appropriate for him to invite an unmarried woman travelling alone to sit at his table – the look on his face does all the talking.

“Die Schwangere und ihre Schwester auch,” Eyk decides. “Und du kannst uns auch Gesellschaft leisten.” It is an entirely unorthodox plan, of course, and there will no doubt be whispers about it, but Eyk has reached a phase in his life that includes very little patience for small talk with fools and sycophants. And with five of them at the table, he and Miss Franklin can maintain at least some claim to propriety.

Sebastian now looks like he is quite literally biting his tongue.

Eyk can still quell him with a look. “Kümmere dich sofort darum,” he says, dismissing him.

Alone on the bridge, Eyk regrets the sharpness of his tone. He and Sebastian have known each other since their Navy days; they were rivals long before they were friends. Sebastian first met Sara when she was a vibrant, outspoken young woman with a rebellious streak a mile wide; he held each of Eyk’s three girls when they were still too young to crawl. Orphaned young and never married, he adopted Eyk’s family as his own. Things have changed a great deal in the last few years, of course, and there is now an unbridgeable distance between them, but Sebastian is still loyal to the man Eyk once was and patient with the man he has become.

The sun dips closer to the horizon, and Eyk runs his thumb along the edge of the watch he carries in his waistcoat pocket. How quickly things can change, he thinks – for the worse, of course, but sometimes for the better. For the first time in a long while, he is looking forward to dinner.

Part IV: Tove

Tove hesitates at the door to Cabin 1011, her hand poised to knock.

I am sorry, she reminds herself. I am sorry for shouting. Thank you for helping. Ada spent the morning convincing her to apologize to Maura Franklin and the afternoon teaching her what to say. Then, just as Tove was about to leave her cabin in search of Maura’s, she and Ada were interrupted by the first mate inviting them both to the captain’s table for dinner tonight. But now she has finally run out of excuses to delay. She knocks.

The door opens almost at once. Maura blinks in surprise at the sight of her, then ushers her in, gesturing to her to sit down on the nearest chair.

“I am sorry for shouting,” Tove recites carefully. “Thank you for helping my sister.”

Maura smiles as she sits on the edge of her bed, facing Tove. “I was happy to. Your sister is very bright. I hope you will make sure that she stays in school for as long as possible once we arrive in New York. And with your permission, I’m happy to keep working with her on her English for the rest of your voyage.”

Most of those words were unfamiliar to Tove, but she recognized enough of them – sister, school, New York, English – to know that the appropriate response is to nod and say thank you again.

“Are you feeling better? Is the baby still giving you trouble?” From Maura’s gently questioning tone, Tove knows she is being asked about her welfare, and she wishes she had the words to explain all that has happened in the last seven months. She would tell Maura how peaceful her life was just a year ago: long days in the fields followed by long evenings at the loom, the inside jokes she shared with Krester, her mother humming as she worked. How Ada would make the long trek to the nearest school each morning through rain or hail or snow. How little they had, and yet how little they wanted for. She would talk about the son of the man whose land they worked – how quiet and kind he was, how Tove sometimes saw him resting his head on Krester’s shoulder. How innocent they were. How angry the landowner was when he found out. How giving Krester a bullet wound that took months to heal and permanently pinned shut the corner of his eye was not enough to satiate his wrath; how he wanted to punish Ada as well, and only settled for Tove instead because Ada, at school, was out of his reach. How he struck Tove unconscious with brutal efficiency, and how the first thing she noticed when she woke up was the rancid smell of his breath on her face. How she cracked his skull open like an egg and shot him at point-blank range. How she does not even recognize her parents anymore, now that the incident has rendered her mother vicious and delusional and her father weak and pliable. How she does not recognize herself anymore either. How Ada is the only one left in their family who has not been changed beyond repair, and how she and Krester would throw themselves overboard without a second thought before they let her suffer as they have suffered.

But she does not have the words, in any language, and so she simply shrugs. Still, Maura’s face softens as if she understands. Unexpectedly, Tove feels a little less alone as she says goodbye like Ada taught her and leaves to find her way back to her own cabin, where Ada is practically vibrating with eagerness to hear how the conversation went.

Dinner that evening is a strange affair. Ada carefully plaited Tove’s hair into a style as fine as any in the first-class dining saloon, but there was little they could do about their ragged grey dresses. Tove keeps her chin up as they cross to the captain’s table, but her hand grips Ada’s like a vice.

Maura and the first mate are already seated when they arrive. The first mate rises politely; it takes Tove a moment to realize that the chair he is holding out is for her. She examines the bizarre array of cutlery before her and tries to hide her confusion. Maura, across the table, gives her a reassuring half-smile.

The captain arrives before Tove has grown bored of cataloguing her row of forks. There are still three empty chairs between Maura and the first mate, but evidently, they are not expecting anyone else; the soup is served as soon as the captain is seated.

Ada spends most of the first course peppering Maura and the captain with questions in a mix of German and English that is utterly incomprehensible to Tove but that the captain seems unfazed by and that Maura can parse with his help. Tove is ready to intervene if either of them seems bothered, but Maura is smiling, and the captain looks more relaxed than she has ever seen him. On Tove’s left, the first mate is silent, his attention focused partly on the captain and partly on the bowl in front of him. Tove more than suspects that he does not want to be here.

“Woher haben Sie Ihre Narben?” Ada asks politely, and Tove nearly chokes on her soup.

“Ada!” she hisses, but the captain does not seem offended.

“She is asking about the scars on my face,” the captain tells Maura, and Tove can sense Ada filing away the new word scars. “It was years ago. The ship I was working on got caught in a storm and the crates in the cargo hold came loose from their netting. One of them knocked me to the ground and tore my face open. I’m lucky it wasn’t much worse. Sebastian” – he nods towards the first mate, who is still determinedly tuning out the whole conversation – “spent hours picking out all the splinters.”

Ada’s open fascination with the story is obvious.

“Ein Unfall wegen Sturmböen,” the captain summarizes for Tove’s sake. “Es ist jetzt lange her.”

The waiters clear away the soup bowls and begin serving platters of thinly sliced meat and baked potatoes while Ada continues with her litany of questions. 

Tove thinks of the plan that she and Krester have sketched out for once they reach New York. It essentially boils down to “run and don’t look back.” As determined as she is to see it through, she has more doubts about it than she can name. If Krester gets cold feet, if Ada refuses to leave their parents, if they cannot find work, if no landlord will rent to them, if someone turns them in – what will become of them? But now, Tove takes a step back from worrying about Ada to notice how she has won over two of the most influential, well-resourced people on this ship. If she asked them captain to help them, would he do it, for Ada’s sake?

Hope is dangerous. Tove knows that better than anyone. But still, she feels it taking root.

Chapter Text

Part I: Olek

In the muted grey light of early morning, the box on deck – shrouded in mist and with a muffled whimpering sounding from it – seems like something from a fairy tale designed to frighten children in their beds.

Olek’s first thought when he sees it is of the dead man from yesterday, of a spirit trapped here while its body sinks into the sea. But then the whimpering becomes louder and something a great deal more solid than a spirit starts banging on the wooden slats, so Olek gathers his courage and throws open the lid.

The girl curled inside the box is not a ghost, but with her face painted dead white and her eyes rimmed in smeared black paint, she bears a strong resemblance to one – although he supposes he must look as strange to her as she does to him, covered in coal dust as he is.

For a moment, they simply stare at each other. Then a tear escapes from the corner of her eye and breaks the impasse. “Wszystko w porządku?” he asks automatically, before realizing how unlikely it is that she would understand. He offers her his hand to help her up and slowly, painfully, she uncurls herself and stumbles to her feet.

He is torn between feeling he should look away to give her privacy as she tries to calm her panicked panting and wanting to stare at those expressive coal-dark eyes in that porcelain-doll face. He compromises by keeping his eyes on her stockinged, sandaled feet. Instinctively, he steps back as she steps forward, worried about dirtying her layers of fine silk if she comes too close.

When he looks up in spite of himself, he sees that her whole body is wracked by shivers so powerful that her teeth are chattering.

“Zimno ci?” Deciding warmth is more important than cleanliness, he shrugs out of his jacket and extends it towards her. “To jest brudne, ale jest ciepłe.” She hesitates at first, and he can hardly blame her – she looks as if she has never touched such a dirty thing in all her life. But if he fears that she will simply run, he is wrong: she takes the jacket and wraps it around herself like a cloak, tries to shrink herself to disappear inside it. He can scarcely see her face anymore between the curtains of her hair.

He feels he should say something else but has no idea what. Even if he could speak this girl’s language, he would know better than to ask what she was doing in the box. Somehow, he feels sure that she went in of her own accord; he recognizes the impulse that drove her inside it as akin in a way to the one that leads him to the lifeboat deck and its vastness at each meal break, although he knows how dangerous it is to trespass there. He does not need her to explain.

Thinking of the lifeboat deck reminds him of how Jérôme built a bridge between them by offering him his name. It seems as good a place to start as any. “Jestem Olek,” he tells the girl, tapping his chest to make his meaning clear.

Again, she hesitates. Her voice, when she speaks, is too low and clear to match her fragile appearance; it gives a sense of the person she might be, under slightly better circumstances. “Ling Yi,” she says.

As if she has summoned it by breaking her silence, another voice begins calling her name from inside.

Later, he will never be certain what made him do it, but without thinking, he extends his hand to her again. “Musimy poszukać lepszej kryjówki dla ciebie.”

This time, she takes his hand immediately.

Part II: Maura  

It is now the fourth full day of the voyage, and despite still being on her father’s steamship, among men who are all in his employ, Maura can feel the knot of anxiety in her throat start to loosen. Her father has cultivated connections across Europe, she knows, but he continues to be dismissive of the New World and has made no effort to expand his sphere of influence to include it. Now that they are closer to their destination than their starting point, freedom feels so close she is half-convinced she can taste it, sweet and citrusy on her tongue, like the oranges she and Ciaran used to share each autumn.

She is standing on the main deck, watching the Kerberos’ bow slice away the water below and letting herself be reassured by this proof of the ship’s speed and power. It thrums like a living thing beneath her feet.

She has to shake herself out of her reverie when she hears her name being called.

“Miss Franklin!” Sebastian’s voice has a hard edge that she is not used to hearing from him, so she is already bracing herself for bad news when she turns. “You are needed in the infirmary again.”

Her first thought is that another crewman has been found dead the way that poor young man was yesterday. She falls into step beside Sebastian, lengthening her stride to match his as he leads her back inside. At this point in their voyage, any delay feels ill-fated. “What happened?”

“It’s the captain. He was hit by a falling blade. He insists he is fine” – behind his impassive expression, Maura can detect a hint of sardonic humour – “but there was a great deal of blood. I thought it best to have you look at him.”

In many ways, this is worse than another corpse in need of an autopsy. She wills her trembling hands to still. Sebastian would not be joking, however drily, if the injury was serious, she reminds herself. “Does this ship not have a surgeon?”

“We do. But I cannot pretend he is particularly well-liked.” His tone is no different than it would be if he were commenting on the weather. Maura bites the inside of her cheek to keep from reacting to his bluntness. “The Kerberos and her sisters – a fleet of three German ships – were purchased by an English investor a few months ago,” he explains. She is vaguely aware of the purchase already, but still, her nails dig into her palms at this mention, however oblique, of her father. “The new owners kept most of the crew, which was generous of them, but our old surgeon decided to move on, and the shipping company chose his replacement. I believe Captain Larsen would sooner die of gangrene than ask for his help. Here we are.” 

The infirmary is a great deal less foreboding by day. The shadows have ceded to sunlight, so she can now see that the room is well-stocked and kept clean – the surgeon may be unpopular, but he clearly takes care of his workplace. And the captain is well enough to be seated upright on the operating table, with his coat off and a bundle of rags pressed against his left shoulder. Sebastian was not overstating things when he said there was a great deal of blood, however; the rags, the captain’s sleeve, and half his waistcoat are all saturated with it.

Sebastian closes the door behind her, leaving her alone with the captain, who looks up at her approach. If he is in pain, he does not show it. “At this rate we will have to start paying you,” he says drily.

Her anxiety seeps away. This, she can handle. “Let me see,” she says briskly, easing the rags away from his shoulder. The wound is long, tracing from collarbone to bicep, but the bleeding has already slowed to an ooze. “What happened exactly?” she asks as she undoes the buttons on his waistcoat and shirt and discards the blood-soaked garments on the counter.

“One of my men dropped a pair of shears from the lookout platform on the foremast,” the captain tells her. “I happened to be standing in the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time.”

His undershirt only buttons halfway and is meant to be pulled off over the head, which she decides she cannot do without disturbing the wound. “This will have to be cut off, I’m afraid,” she says, already searching through the cabinets for scissors.

He gives a one-shouldered shrug. “Do what you must.”

The white linen cuts easily, and she manages to peel it off his shoulders without restarting the bleeding. “Are you always this accident-prone?” she asks lightly as she searches the cabinets again, collecting sterile saline, clean rags, iodine, carbolic, catgut, a needle, fresh bandages, gauze.

“This is unusual even for me.” He does not flinch as she begins dabbing at the drying blood with saline. Beneath his usual layers of clothing, he is thinner than she expected – arms ropy with muscle, divots between his ribs. His shoulders and chest are one pale shade lighter than his suntanned face, and their patchwork of scars – a jagged scratch tracing up from one elbow, striated where it was stitched, and something that looks disturbingly like an old bullet wound on his upper back – give lie to his claim.

Once the wound is clean, the basin of saline darkening from pink to red as the rags she used drip into it, she can see how lucky he was – the shears cut deep at the point of his shoulder, but the rest of the wound is scarcely more than a scratch. “You’ll need a few stitches, but this isn’t too bad. It will heal cleanly if you take good care of it.” He still does not flinch when the needle pierces his skin, but she can tell that he is affected now by the deliberate way he matches his breathing to hers. Suddenly, she realizes how close she is to him, her skirts brushing against his leg as she stands beside him, her arm braced in the hollow space between his neck and collarbone. She reminds herself to exhale as she completes the fourth and final stitch, keeping it as small and even as its antecedents. “There. That was the worst part.”

He watches her wordlessly as she dilutes carbolic acid in sterile water and soaks a gauze square in the solution. The wound’s placement makes it awkward to bandage; she has to wrap the muslin strips all the way around his chest to keep them in place, bringing her even closer to him than before. She can feel the warmth of his body even through the bandages as she fastens them.

Still not speaking, he rests his head lightly against hers. She lets herself go still, closes her eyes to better feel the curve of his forehead against her hair. She could move her hand from his bandaged shoulder to his face so easily, she thinks. She could turn her face towards his. She could say something. Something flippant, something teasing, something tender. But the moment feels as fragile as the first frost, and so she simply lets it be.

“All done,” she says, once she is certain she can speak calmly. “You should avoid using this arm for a few days. Do you need a sling, or will you remember?” She falls into the familiar motions of wiping down the counters with carbolic, tucking everything back into its place.

“I’ll remember,” he says. He stands and shrugs carefully into his ruined shirt. “Thank you for this. It’s very neat work.”

“You’re a very well-behaved patient.” He smiles at that – scarcely a twitch of one corner of his mouth, and yet Maura finds herself smiling in return. 

Once he is gone, she looks at her hands and is pleased to see that they are steady. And all that morning – as she goes in search of Ada, to whom she owes another English lesson, as the two of them pace the decks together, trading phrases back and forth, as they study the lunch menu and the ship’s bulletin until Ada knows every last word – all that morning, they stay that way.

Part III: Tove

When Tove wakes in the late morning, Ada is gone again, but this time there is no reason to panic – Tove knows her sister is with Maura again, trying to stuff as much knowledge into her head as she possibly can in the space of a week. With no one to worry about and nowhere to be, Tove simply watches the way the dust motes drifting through the air above her catch the light, until the baby’s nudging her bladder becomes impossible to ignore.

Three more days, Tove thinks to herself – both a reminder and a promise – as she waits for Ada to return in time for the midday meal as she said she would. Tove’s plan is crystallizing. She will speak to Ada today, and then to Krester; tomorrow, she will approach the captain. And she will need to speak to her father at some point as well; the closer they get to New York, the more Tove realizes she cannot simply walk away from him without a word, even if all his attention is taken up by her mother these days. He is doing his best, just as Tove herself is, and he deserves at least an explanation.

Ada, when she bursts in through the door just before noon, is lit from within by excitement. Tove does not have the heart to interrupt her and lets her chatter on all through their walk to the dining saloon, their time at the table, and their return to the cabin.

“Ada,” she says finally, taking both of her sister’s hands in her own. “Sæt dig ned. Lyt til mig.”

Slowly, choosing her words carefully, she lays out her case. Ada wants desperately to stay in school, but school plays no part in their parents’ plans. If Ada stays with them, she will be co-opted into helping them build their church and handing out Bibles on street corners. If they all stay together, their father will be too busy looking after their mother to mind Ada, so it is in all their best interests – Ada’s, Tove’s, Krester’s, even their parents’ – for the three siblings to strike out on their own. “Tag væk med os,” Tove all but begs. “Det vil være svært, men vi vil altid passe på dig. Du kan afslutte din skolegang. Jeg lover.”

Ada’s lower lip trembles. Tove is forcibly reminded of how young she is, and how completely she believed, on some level, that everything could once again be as it was. “Græd ikke,” Tove implores, near tears herself. And Ada heeds her. She bites down on her lip and lifts her chin – Tove recognizes the latter gesture as her own – and then at last she nods, in agreement with their plan.

Tove’s relief is so powerful she slumps back into her chair. When she goes in search of Krester to tell him the latest, leaving Ada behind in the cabin to play with her doll, she feels lighter than she has in months – for freedom is now closer than it has ever been, so close she can almost taste it, her horizons expanding until they encompass the whole world.

It does not last.

She finds Krester sitting on what was once her bunk, his shoulders curled in toward his centre and his head bowed low over something. She feels an echo of the same protective ache she felt when Ada was near tears. According to her mother, she is only five minutes older than Krester, but sometimes she thinks it might as well be five years. She still tries to look out for him as she did when he was small enough to cling to their mother’s apron strings when he was scared, but it seems to become more futile with every passing day. He is nineteen now, a man grown, and he no longer minds her.

As she gets closer, she realizes the little silver thing he is looking at is not their precious family cross, but something far too strange and ornate to belong here. She snatches it from his hands. “Hvor har du den fra?”

He is on his feet at once. “Giv mig.” He grabs for it as if they are still small children, grappling over their shares of berries and winter apples like nothing mattered more in all the world.

But Krester is no child, and neither is she. The thing in her hands is a cigarette case, solid silver, finely wrought, and now that she has taken a good look at it, she knows at once what it means. “Du idiot,” she hisses through her teeth. He cannot meet her eyes.

She clenches her fist around the thing as she goes in search of its owner. A man all in white, Krester told her reluctantly. Finely dressed, insouciant, speaking in tongues. It does not take her long to find him on the upper deck. Men like that, they want to be found.

She wants to shake him. Don’t ruin this for us, she wants to say. Not when we’re so close. But the officer with the blemished face is watching her from the stairwell, and while he made no move to stop her coming up here, she assumes he would draw a line at physical assault.

So she settles for holding the cigarette case up so she knows the man in white can see it and then tossing it at his feet, hoping it dents. “Hold dine beskidte fingre fra min bror,” she seethes. “Hvis du rører ham igen, jeg skærer din pik af.” He probably does not speak Danish, but she trusts he will work out what she means.

She stalks back to the stairwell and pushes her way past the officer there. “Alles in Ordnung?” he asks, making to touch her elbow and then thinking better of it.

“Jetzt schon,” she says, and means it.

Part IV: Eyk

As he has been doing for a solid hour now, Eyk folds and unfolds the telegraph message that Wilhelm handed him this morning when he returned from the infirmary.

It arrived last night while Eyk was at dinner, Wilhelm told him, just minutes before they passed out of range of the shipping company’s Southampton telegraph – there may even be a sentence or two missing from the end, although the message is still clear. Eyk expected a standardized condolence message about Eugen’s death and nearly tucked it into his pocket without looking at it – but the message, he saw from a quick glance, is not regarding Eugen at all. Singleton’s daughter missing, believed kidnapped, it reads. Advise company at once of any passengers matching her description: red haired, early thirties, with medical knowledge, likely travelling alone. Father and husband fear for her safety.

He cannot respond one way or another until they come within range of the company’s New York telegraph tomorrow, which at least buys him time. Whether it is the broken telegraph key from yesterday or sheer luck that he has to thank for this grace period, Eyk has been making the most of it: all afternoon, he tried to put the message out of his mind, busying himself with his maps and cargo inventories and crew schedules. But its contradictions are impossible to ignore. Why would a kidnapped woman be travelling alone, in the absence of her kidnappers? Why should her presence be reported to the shipping company and not to the police?

He thinks of Maura smiling at Ada across the dinner table yesterday, of the way she let him rest his head against her hair this morning after she finished bandaging his shoulder. The description matches her too closely to ignore, and yet nothing about her suggests a woman forcibly separated from her husband.

Eyk crumples Wilhelm’s transcription in his pocket, then pulls it out, uncrumples it, reads through it again. He will wait here in the wheelhouse until Sebastian arrives to supervise the next watch, he decides, and then he will knock on Maura’s door.

When he finally does, she answers at once, as if she was waiting for him. Despite the lateness of the hour – it is nearing midnight – she is fully dressed, praise God for small mercies.

“Eyk? Is something wrong?”

He hesitates. Her brow knits. “Is it your shoulder? Are you in pain?”

“Come with me,” he finally says. This is not a conversation they should be having in the hallway. He leads her out onto the deck, making sure that they are out of sight and earshot of the overnight watch. Once he is sure they are alone, he hands her the message.

Her face goes white as she reads. When she finishes and looks up, he almost does not recognize her – this terrified creature who clenches and unclenches her hands as she paces is such a far cry from the self-possessed, competent woman he thinks he has come to know.

“Did you tell them? Did you tell them where I am?”

“No. Even if I wanted to, I won’t be able to until tomorrow, probably late tomorrow morning. We are too far from shore right now to reach the shipping company via telegraph.” 

She gives a shaky nod but does not pause in her pacing.

“Miss Franklin, what is the meaning of this? Are you in danger? Is someone threatening you?”

“You don’t understand,” she says. Panic makes her voice small. “You don’t understand.”

“I don’t. But as long as you are on this ship you are under my protection. No harm will come to you, I guarantee it.” He reaches out to grip her hand, remembering how she did the same for him just days ago. “Tell me what is happening, please, and I can help you.”

Her pacing slows, then stops. She nods slowly.

In the distance, the ship’s bell is rung eight times. Midnight. 

Chapter Text

Part I: Maura  

“Henry Singleton is my father, that much is true,” Maura begins. Her breathing is so shallow that she is starting to feel light-headed. It makes it difficult to get the words out, but the weight of Eyk’s gaze is as palpable as a hand upon her shoulder – pinning her in place, urging her to go on. “Franklin was my mother’s maiden name – I was born Maura Singleton. But I’m not married, and I haven’t been kidnapped. I’m on this ship of my own free will.” Those, she supposes, are the most important things for Eyk to know. All that remains is to convince him of their truth.

“My father has built up quite the business empire over the years. Most of the money comes from transportation and logistics, but my father has no interest in that side of things; he leaves it entirely to his deputies. Although the one managing this fleet seems to be floundering – I’m sure you’ve noticed that a third of your cabins are empty and this voyage is barely turning a profit.” She realizes she is rambling, when all she meant to do is explain. “My father has never been interested in owning ships. His interest – his obsession – is with the human brain. He owns several asylums in England, and he funds alienists and phrenologists and neurologists all over Europe.”

She forces herself to take a deep breath as she thinks back to her earliest memories. Morefield, 30 years ago. The crisp cleanness of the air, its sharp scents, the way the light would play upon the water. “My father has always wanted things to be just so.” This, to say the least, is putting it mildly. “I have a brother, Ciaran, who’s a year younger than I am. When he was born, my father had grand plans for him – he expected Ciaran to be a miniature version of him, I suppose, and he wanted him to grow up and take over the family business one day. But as Ciaran got older, it became clear that he was … a little slow.” She searches for the right words to describe her brother, tries to see him as he was then through her own eyes and not her father’s. “He took a long time to learn to speak and he was … fragile, I suppose, and easily frightened. By the time he was five, my father had lost patience with him. Ciaran was still having difficulty speaking, and despite having all the best teachers, he hadn’t been able to learn his letters at all. My father sent him away, to some school in the countryside somewhere.” Time has blurred most of her memories of her brother, but she can remember the last time she saw him, when he was being bundled into a carriage, with terrible distinctness. His button eyes and chipmunk cheeks and shock of bright red hair. She remembers that he smiled like it was all a big adventure. He had no idea that he was not coming back. “Once Ciaran was gone, my father put the word out that he had died, and he refused to so much as speak of him.” She can see that even Eyk, who no doubt thought he had seen all the cruelty that the world has to offer, is a little shocked by that.

“My mother had always been prone to depression, but with Ciaran gone, she got worse. Whole days would go by when she wouldn’t get out of bed. Eventually, my father lost patience with her too, and he had her committed to one of his asylums. She died there when I was about eight or nine, I think. He took it quite hard. I do believe he loved her, in his own strange way.”

There is a look of terrible pity on Eyk’s face that she does not deserve. “I was young, but that’s no excuse. My father told me that it was better this way, better with Ciaran and our mother gone, because they were weak, and we were strong. And I believed him. At that age, I idolized him. I lived for his praise, and he encouraged my interests in science and medicine and supported my studies and challenged me to be a smarter, better version of myself. For a while, it seemed natural, that it was just the two of us. But as I got older, I started to wonder. When I was sixteen, I went through my father’s files and found the invoices from my brother’s schooling and I contacted the headmaster there, and he found a forwarding address for me. I wrote to Ciaran, and he wrote back, and we’ve been in touch ever since.” She remembers receiving his first letter, crumpled and stained from its trip across the Atlantic, and thinking with unwarranted envy that it had seen more of the world than she had. “He was taken in by the family of one of his schoolmates; they moved to New York years ago and took Ciaran with them. He says that he still has trouble speaking, but he outgrew his other difficulties and was doing quite well in school by the time that he left England. He works for a bank now, and he’s married, and he says it all worked out for the best. But he warned me to be wary of our father. He told me that one day I might do something to displease him, and he would turn against me as quickly as he had turned against Ciaran.” She knows now that she should have heeded him better. “It’s not that I didn’t believe Ciaran. I did. I distanced myself from my father; I started putting aside money in case I ever needed it. But at the same time, I didn’t believe my father could ever hurt me, not really.

“When I was in medical school, my father hired a young man straight out of Oxford to be his – his protégé, I suppose, his heir. Daniel was – is – clever, and a good listener, and he liked me, probably a great deal more than I liked him, which was flattering. We started courting. My father encouraged it, and the whole thing seemed so easy, so effortless. And then one day, Daniel came to see me unexpectedly. He was upset, and angrier than I had ever seen him. He told me that he had found out something terrible about the company, about the asylums. He told me my father had found a young mother in a workhouse and offered her more money than she could turn down, and he brought her to one of his asylums, and then he set to work on her, making her sleep and wake at odd hours, hypnotizing her, injecting her with experimental drugs, applying electric shocks, seeing how much her mind could withstand before it broke. She went mad, of course, and once she did, he ended the experiment and had her permanently institutionalized.

“I didn’t believe it at first. But I broke into my father’s office and went through his files, and it was all there, like Daniel said. Records about that woman, and others just like her. Vulnerable, impoverished, desperate people who had only one thing of value – a sound mind and body – and he found a way to take that from them.

“I confronted him. I threatened to expose him, to go to the papers, to the church, to the police. He let me finish raging at him, and then he started talking very calmly. He told me that the experiments were a necessary evil, that they were the only way to get to the one thing the world needed above all else: a cure for madness. Something that would have fixed my mother. He told me he couldn’t let me get in his way.

“It happened so quickly. One minute we were in his office, sitting down and talking like civilized people, and the next he had called in two orderlies, and they were injecting me with something, something black and viscous. I still don’t know what. When I woke up, I was in one of the cells in the asylum, and my father was explaining that I could say whatever I wanted to whomever I wanted, but no one would believe a word from a woman who had been committed for mental instability.” She still knows the cracks on the ceiling of that cell better than she knows the pattern of veins on the back of her own hand. The things that happened to her there – some of them she cannot give voice to, no matter how good a listener Eyk has proven himself to be. She still has some sense of decency, after all. “The asylum, it was worse than I could ever have imagined. They did all the same things to me that they had done to that woman and then some. I know that I was only there for a few weeks, but it felt like much longer – I lost track of time; I lost track of what was real. I would have whole conversations with my mother, with Daniel, with my professors from medical school, and then I would blink, and they would be gone.

“Because of all that, it took me a long time to realize that I was pregnant. And then it took me longer still to convince my father of it, that I wasn’t just imagining it.” She still shudders to think of the doctors he brought in to confirm it, the way one of them had leered at her as he splayed her open. “But once he realized it was true, he was pleased. A child of Daniel’s and mine – if it was a son, it would be the heir of his own blood that he had always wanted. So for the baby’s sake, he freed me. He put out the word that Daniel and I had wed privately and that we were planning a big public wedding soon.

“I started wearing a ring and I went through all the motions of planning a wedding, but I kept putting it off. I worried that Daniel was under my father’s thumb – he didn’t agree with what my father was doing, but he was going along with it, and marrying him would tie me to them both forever.

“So I started planning my escape. I pawned my jewellery, my viola, my medical equipment, everything of value that I owned. I packed a bag. Meanwhile, Daniel and my father were both becoming frustrated with the delays. Daniel and I argued.”

She has never told anyone, ever, what happened next, never even hinted at it. “It wasn’t his fault. It really wasn’t.” It feels important, somehow, that Eyk should know this. “He didn’t touch me, but we were arguing, and we were standing on the landing at the top of the stairs in his house, and I took a step backward, and I fell.

“I’m a doctor, but I didn’t know it was possible to bleed that much and not die. Daniel took me to the hospital where I had trained, and the doctors there saved my life, barely. I lost the baby, and they said that I can’t have children anymore.” She has wanted children for as long as she can remember; from those halcyon early days when she toddled around their estate in Morefield with Ciaran clutching at her fingers, trusting her not to let him fall. That dream is rooted too deep for her to let go of it entirely, but at the same time, a part of her fears that her baby may be better off this way. It was the boy her father wanted – the doctors told her that. Dead, he is out of her father’s reach; if he had lived, she would have struggled to protect him and hated herself and Daniel and perhaps her son as well when she inevitably failed. “I stayed in the hospital for as long as I could. I was among friends there; my own connections among the hospital staff far outnumbered my father’s, so I knew I could trust them. Eventually, they moved me to a convalescent home outside of London that they were affiliated with, and I spent several more months there. Daniel came to see me regularly, and when I told him I was leaving, he agreed. He brought me the bag I had packed, and I returned my ring to him, and we said our goodbyes.

“I don’t know if Daniel told my father what I was planning or if someone else did, but he came to the convalescent home on one of my last days there. He was livid when I insisted that I was leaving. He grabbed my wrists hard enough to bruise. But a nurse saw him, and he had to let me go. We were among my friends this time, not his, and he couldn’t hurt me there in public. So he left, and I was discharged, and I fled. I made it to Southampton, and then this was the first ship to New York that still had tickets left to sell.”

She falls silent, finally, and forces herself to look up to meet Eyk’s eyes.

If she did not know better, she would think he was feeling seasick from the way his mouth is twisted. She cannot read him well enough to know what he will do.

She waits. The silence drags on.

“And when we arrive in New York? What do you plan to do then?” he asks finally.

“My father’s influence doesn’t extend to America, I’m quite certain of it, so once I’m off this ship I should be out of his reach. Ciaran is in New York and he’s expecting me.” It will be strange to see him again; in her head, he is forever five years old. “And there are women doctors there now, I hear. I should be able to teach, and I might even be able to practice someday.”

“Good,” he murmurs, more to himself than to her, it seems. “That’s good.”

She wants to ask him if he believes her, but she thinks she cannot bear it if he, too, decides that she is mad. So she foregoes that question in favour of one she cannot avoid asking: “Are you going to tell the company where I am?”

He looks startled at that – that much, she can tell clearly. “Of course not. I told you; no harm will come to you here. I may work for Henry Singleton, but this ship is still under my command, and the safety of its passengers is my responsibility. Although I will need to start looking for a new command as soon as possible.”

She thinks at first she has misheard him. “Why?”

“I can’t continue working for this company now, after what you’ve just told me about what is being done with the profits from these crossings,” he explains, as if it should be obvious.

Since she first saw the concern on his face as he translated for her at Tove’s bedside, she has known that he is an honest man and a decent one. But still, she was not expecting him to prove it quite so thoroughly. She resists the urge to throw her arms around him.  

“You should sleep,” Eyk says, interrupting her train of thought before she can act on it. “I’ve kept you up long enough. Tomorrow I’ll respond to the shipping company and tell them there is no one on board matching this description. Wilhelm – the officer who received the message – is the only other person who knows what it says, and I will make sure that he keeps quiet about it. I intend to see you safely to your brother’s door, Miss Franklin.”

His use of the name she has chosen for herself is even more reassuring than his promises are. “Thank you,” she says, hoping he can tell how fervently she means it.

He walks her back inside in comfortable silence. “Thank you,” she says again, just before he leaves her at her cabin door. “For not thinking I’m crazy.”

In response, she gets one of those half-smiles she has grown so fond of. She closes the door behind her and sinks down against it in relief. Her greatest fear – that her father would find her – has passed by her harmlessly, and Eyk, having learned her secrets, is still able to look her in the eye.

Despite the upheaval, she falls asleep easily that night, the now-familiar sounds of the ship soothing her into unconsciousness. She dreams she is on a lifeboat with Eyk, drifting ahead of the Kerberos, lying curled up on its floorboards with her head resting on his chest while the mist hangs low over them like a curtain. It is a peaceful dream, suffused with warmth, and she tries to hold onto it for as long as possible.

Maura Franklin, she reminds herself before she leaves her cabin that next morning to go to the bridge in search of Eyk. Not crazy. Not who I used to be. The words no longer carry the same urgency.

Through the bridge’s panels of inclined windows, she can see Eyk and Sebastian in deep discussion over a map. The compass on its stand nearly blocks them both from view, but as if he can sense her eyes on him, Eyk glances up to see her out on deck and gestures to her to come inside.

“Ma’am,” Sebastian acknowledges her politely, inclining his head in a cursory bow before brushing past her to leave. She wonders, not for the first time, at the mix of fondness and coldness with which he treats the captain, all locked under an impenetrable veneer of the respect that befits his station. She will ask Eyk about it someday.

“Did you sleep well?” Eyk asks her, setting down his pencil.

“I did,” she says, with honesty. “Is something wrong?”

“Not wrong exactly. Do you see that?” He takes her arm to turn her towards one of the windows and points at a grey smudge barely visible on the horizon. Her arm feels strange when he releases it, as if the absence of his hand has become a presence of its own.

She would not have noticed the discoloration of the sky if he had not pointed it out, but now that he has, she wonders how she missed it. “Is that a storm?”

“Yes. We’ve adjusted our course to sail toward it. A ship this size can withstand a storm like that if we steer directly into it, but if the waves strike us from the side, we will risk capsizing.”

There is a metaphor in there somewhere, she thinks.

“Is it dangerous?”

“I won’t tempt fate by saying it’s not. But don’t worry – I’ve sailed through larger storms before, and in much less sturdy ships than this one.”

“I’m not worried,” she says. “Just wondering.”

“My wife used to read every weather report she could get her hands on while I was at sea,” he tells her. She can sense, without him saying so, how unusual it is for him to mention her so casually, how much of a change this signifies. “She worried a great deal about us suffering damage in a storm or capsizing. But the real threat to a steamship like this is—”

“Fire,” she realizes, and feels how sharply the irony stings.

“Yes.” He clears his throat. “Anyway, she had no shortage of things to worry about. It’s not much of a life, being a sea captain’s wife.”

“I wouldn’t mind,” she says without thinking, and then she flushes to the roots of her hair as she realizes what has just come out of her mouth. “I just meant – I expect there would be advantages, too, to having a husband who’s not constantly there to make demands of you. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and all that.”

He huffs a laugh. “You have an interesting idea of marriage.”

She can hardly deny it.

“If there are injuries today, I’d request your help again in the infirmary,” he says, changing the topic without even pretending to segue. She nods her assent, and he steps away from the window, turning his attention back to his maps. “Do you remember the way?”

“I’ll find it,” she assures him. And as much as she is glad to be made useful, she is sorry to leave him alone on the bridge.

Part II: Olek

From the moment Olek woke this morning there has been tension in the air. They may not be able to see the lightning on the horizon from the boiler room or feel the weather getting colder and more humid, but the news that the storm is larger and approaching more quickly than expected spreads rapidly from above deck to below. The coal stokers all keep their heads down and their chatter to a minimum as they follow shouted orders to keep the engines going, even as the rolling of the ship beneath their feet becomes more jarring.

“Du! Olek!” the officer with the blemished face shouts from the metal staircase that leads down into the bowels of the engine room. The ship heaves, and he grasps the railing just in time to keep himself from losing his footing. “Die Schotten müssen geschlossen werden. Sonst kommt überall Wasser rein.”

If the bulkheads need to be closed, that means things are even more serious than Olek thought. As if to underscore his realization, the ship heaves again as Olek hands his shovel off to the man next to him and follows the officer out of the engine room. Jérôme, who has not let Olek out of his sight since the incident on deck two days ago, rushes after them. The look on the officer’s face makes Olek think he is going to protest, but all he says is “Gut. Zu dritt geht es leichter.”

The first one they do together. The outermost compartment is flooded with a good twenty centimetres of water, they see, with more rushing in every minute. Icy water soaks through Olek’s trousers as he forces the hatch door closed so Jérôme and the officer can clamp it into place. The seal locks with a satisfying finality, but the muffled sounds of the ocean outside are even more disconcerting than the sight of the flooding itself was. Once he is sure that the water cannot breach this bulkhead, the officer sends Olek and Jérôme to close the two corresponding doors on the opposite side of the ship while he finishes here on this side.

On their own now, Olek and Jérôme close their first bulkhead without issue; the second, they realize, lacks a handle.

“Que faisons-nous maintenant?” Jérôme releases the useless door, and the water slams it against the wall. It’s like something doesn’t want us to make it to shore, the superstitious part of Olek whispers. He thinks of Ling Yi, says a quick prayer that she was safely inside her cabin when this whole mess started and not wandering the exposed main deck again.

They have no choice but to sacrifice the outer compartment to the flooding, which is now past knee-high here, and to focus on locking the next bulkhead further in. Jérôme leans against the door once it is sealed, his breathing heavy and his shoulders hunching. Not for the first time, Olek wonders what his friend is even doing on this ship. Does he fear the wealthy couple who intervened with the officer on his behalf, or does he fear for them? In the past two days, he has tried asking several variations on this question, first in his broken German and then in his even more broken English, but Jérôme either does not understand either language or is doing a very good job of pretending not to.

They have just finished catching their breath and are about to head back to the engine room when the officer comes to check on them.

“Gut gemacht,” he says in grudging approval when he checks the sealed bulkhead before sending them back on their way to the engine room. “Wenn wir die Maschinen nicht am Laufen halten, dann werden wir alle sterben,” he reminds them.

It happens just as they take up their shovels again. The storm-tossed ship jerks beneath their feet, causing one of the open furnaces to overflow without warning, spewing forth hot coals and flames that lick at the labourers’ legs. Olek is out of the fire’s reach, barely, but Jérôme is not so lucky, and neither is the man next to him. The uninjured spring into action, Olek among them, smothering the fire in blankets.

When they have at last suppressed the flames, Olek helps Jérôme to his feet. He is hissing in pain, but it seems he has escaped the worst of it – he is at least able to stand upright without assistance, although Olek knows how fickle a burn can be. “Bring ihn in die Krankenabteilung,” one of the supervising officers says, jerking his chin in the right direction.

Olek puts an arm around Jérôme's shoulders to guide him, and they take one tentative step and then another. Please let this be the worst of it, Olek prays. Please.

Part III: Tove

They make an odd trio, the women in the infirmary – Maura, brisk and businesslike with her sleeves rolled up, clearly the leader among them; Tove, heavily pregnant, her skin leached to a pale greenish shade by seasickness; and the elegant Frenchwoman, her voluminous cream silk gown hardly suited to the setting, who offered them an extra pair of hands when things got busy after the engine room fire, when Maura was in no position to refuse. Clémence has put on a raw linen apron and made the best of it. Tove has never seen anyone so beautiful.

The ship has almost cleared the storm now, but those on board will be dealing with its aftermath until well after nightfall. The two men with the most serious burns are under the care of the ship’s surgeon, whose brow is wrinkled in concentration as he debrides the wounds. Maura is preparing dressings for them. “They were lucky,” she whispers to Tove and Clémence as she works. “They’ll be alright.” Still, Tove notices that Clémence keeps glancing back at one of the two burned men.

Clémence and Tove, as untrained volunteers, have a litany of minor injuries to contend with in the meantime – scrapes and sprains from falls, a man near freezing after a particularly violent wave nearly swept him overboard.

Tove’s latest patient is the officer who stopped her on the stairwell yesterday. The old wounds on his face are bleeding yet again. She wipes away the blood with saline to reveal a mess of half-healed scabs and open scrapes and begins cleaning them as Maura taught her to this morning. She also takes the opportunity to finally ask his name – after all, he has been kind to her since she first boarded, and she should really stop thinking of him as the man with the blemished face.

She is reaching for an iodine swab when a wave of pain passes through her middle. She nearly drops the swab. The pain recedes as quickly as it took hold of her, and she shakes herself. It’s nothing.

Franz notices her hesitation. “Stimmt was nicht?”

She shakes her head once, and then again, more empathically, willing herself to believe it as she does.

Part IV: Eyk

Just an hour ago, the wind was whipping up waves as high as mountains, but now the sea has gone so glassy and still that anyone would think no storm had ever touched it.

From Eyk’s vantage point up on the bridge, the Kerberos appears uncowed, the only visible damage a lifeboat coming loose from its rigging. But he knows there was trouble down below. The wind conspired against them from above, the water from below, and the fire from within – but at least there were no casualties.

He promised Maura a safe journey, after all.

Once they are far enough away from the storm that Eyk can safely leave the bridge, he heads down to the infirmary to check on the extent of the injuries. It has mostly emptied out by the time that he arrives, except for a young coal stoker helping two colleagues with bandaged legs to step gingerly toward the door. Eyk promises the two injured men all the rest they need and nods his thanks to their companion. Once those three have departed, it is just the surgeon, Maura, and Tove who remain in the room with Eyk. Tove is re-wrapping bandages, her shoulders tensed as if in pain, while Maura helps the surgeon douse everything in antiseptic. Eyk could watch the swift movements of Maura’s slim, pale hands all evening. Her sleeves are pushed up to reveal the strong tendons of her forearms, the single dark freckle at the base of her left hand, and the fading bruises around each wrist. Something twists beneath his sternum, and he forces himself to turn away before she can see him stare.

The surgeon, blasted man, gives Eyk the most cursory of reports, acting as if he resents his captain’s presence all the while; Eyk fully intends to ask Maura for the details later. For now, he agrees to leave them to their work.

“Kapitän?” Tove has followed him to the door. Her arm is cradled around her belly, the first time Eyk has seen such a gesture from her. He again gets the sense that something is wrong. “Darf ich etwas fragen?”

“Geh ein Stück mit mir,” he offers. She takes his arm and he waits for her to start speaking as he leads her up the stairwell, towards the post-storm light.

Chapter Text

Part I: Tove

The ache that radiates out from the small of her back no longer eases, and waves of acute pain now grip her abdomen with clockwork regularity – every ten minutes, according to the watch that Maura gave Ada, then seven, and now five. As best as she can count it, Tove is not quite thirty-two weeks along, but this morning she woke to find mucus staining her thighs.

Tove is no fool. She knows what this means.

All through the morning, Tove tried to keep her face free of pain or fear, for Ada’s sake. She sat at the breakfast table and turned her cup of tea in its saucer, swirled her spoon through the cooling liquid until a tiny whirlpool formed. She listened to Ada talk and she nodded and interjected at all the right places, and all the while she thought of her conversation with the captain yesterday evening, reminded herself that he had promised far more than she had dared to ask him for. A reference to a landlady he knows in New York, their first months’ rent, a job for Krester on the docks. Everything they will need to start anew. His only condition was that she get her father’s blessing, which she had set her heart on doing anyway.

They are so close. And yet, it may all still fall apart. Krester cannot care for Ada on his own; if she does not make it through this journey, through this labour, her brother and sister will be left exactly where they started, as cogs in a broken wheel.

As noon approaches, Tove and Ada walk the upper deck together, Ada’s fingers curled around her wrist. Staying in motion soothes her, as does the warmth of the late morning sun. Under her breath, Ada counts their steps in careful English: one hundred eighteen, one hundred nineteen, one hundred twenty. On one hundred twenty-three, another pain tears through her, stronger than the ones that came before. Tove makes one quick, low sound before she forces herself to go silent.

“Tove? Er der noget galt?”

She stumbles. Her head spins. She cannot regain her balance.

“Pass auf,” says a voice behind her, and an arm wraps around her shoulders, breaking her fall. It takes her several tries, but by leaning heavily on Franz, she manages to regain her footing. “Komm. Lass uns hineingehen,” he says, in a tone that brooks no argument.

Slowly, they make their way through the corridors together, Ada, silent and watchful, trailing behind.

“Soll ich deine Familie sagen, dass—”

“Nein!” Tove interrupts before he can get past the first half of his sentence. He looks a little startled at her vehemence, but he nods his acquiescence without pressing her further. “Nein, bitte nicht, aber kannst – können Sie Miss Franklin finden?”

He agrees again as he unlocks her cabin door for her and steps aside so Ada can lead her in. “Ich bin gleich wieder zurück.”

Once he is gone, Ada sits on the edge of the bed and watches anxiously as Tove continues her pacing.

The next pain comes well before the five-minute mark and lasts longer than the others. Tove grips the back of the cabin’s chair and tries to count the seconds; she makes it past thirty before she loses track. She can no longer pretend this is not happening.

She tries to keep her breathing deep and even. She tries to make no noise.

“Tove?” Ada asks tentatively.

Tove looks her sister directly in the eye. “Vær ikke bange. Det skal nok gå.”

It has been a long, long time since she last made a promise that she knew she could not keep.

Part II: Maura

This weather is too perfect to last, Maura thinks as she stands at the railing, Eyk beside her in an echo of their first meeting, just five days ago. Perhaps it all is. For weeks she has been longing desperately for her arrival in New York, but now that it is imminent, a part of her wishes she could hold it off for just a little longer.

She was up early this morning – ostensibly to check on the burned men from yesterday, but really because her sleep was disrupted by luminous, indistinct dreams of Eyk, so much so she had to curl up on her side and will her body to be calm when she awoke. In the infirmary after breakfast, she confirmed that Jérôme and Darrel had both managed to dodge the spectre of infection, at least so far; then, at loose ends after the men had returned to their berths to rest, she began walking the main deck, completing one loop around the ship and starting on another before Eyk found her.

They have discussed the damage that the storm caused yesterday – what kind of ongoing care the injured will require, how the ship can still function without its five outermost compartments – and now they have lapsed into comfortable silence.

“Did you and Sebastian argue?” Maura asks, without apology for the suddenness.

“Yesterday?” Eyk makes a good show of mild confusion, but Maura suspects he already knows what she means.

“No, I meant in general,” she clarifies. “The way he talks about you, and to you, it seems…complicated.”

He shrugs as if it is of no great importance, but he weighs his words carefully before he speaks. “Sebastian and I met Sara at the same time, at a dinner her father hosted in Hamburg, decades ago. The two of them became close. When we were in the Navy, he and I didn’t really get along, but we learned to be friends for her sake, and it just…didn’t last once she was gone.” He pauses, seeming to consider whether to say more. “He told me not to marry her. He said – I think the way he put it was that she deserved better than to spend her days waiting at the hearth for a husband who would never fully belong to her. When she died – perhaps he took it as proof that he was right.” Again, he hesitates. “Does that answer your question?”

In a way, it does, although Maura suspects that envy poisoned that particular well long before grief entered it. She wonders who it was that Sebastian was jealous of – Sara, or Eyk himself.

Either way, she is spared from having to come up with an answer by Franz’s rapidly approaching footsteps. Maura turns her eyes towards the horizon, expecting him to address Eyk, not her, but the first words out of his mouth are to tell her she is needed.

“What happened?” She thinks of burned flesh gone putrid.

“Tove – the baby – she is having pains.”

Eyk looks up at that. “It’s too soon,” he says. “She told me she was only seven months along.”

“I think it’s closer to eight now,” Maura says, mentally tallying all the two-month-premature births she has read about or heard discussed. Survival is not out of the question, she concludes, for the mother or the child. She decides not to calculate just how likely a good outcome is at this point. “But yes, it’s too soon.”

“Do you want me to notify the surgeon?” Franz asks. His face is inscrutable beneath its scabs, but Maura suspects that his hands, hidden behind his back, are in fists.

Eyk shakes his head at that. “He’ll just call this God’s way of disposing of a child not fit to live.”

“Right. Better leave him out of it then,” Maura decides. “But can you find out if there is a nurse or a midwife among the passengers? I could use some help if it’s available.”

Once Franz has nodded and left, Maura chews her lower lip as she thinks back to her own time in hospital, trying to remember what helped. “Is there chloroform in the infirmary? Or ether?” she asks Eyk.

He frowns. “I think so, but is that safe to give her?”

“In controlled quantities, it should be. I’ll give her enough to dull the pain without leaving her unconscious or slowing the labour.”

“I’ll find it, then. Anything else?”

“I need an antiseptic – carbolic acid, or better yet, sublimate of mercury. Sterile water and as many clean towels as you can find. Needle and catgut, like what I used on you.” She prays forceps won’t be needed, as they are unlikely to be available on a ship and she, frankly, has no idea how to use them.

They part ways at the base of the stairwell, Eyk heading toward the infirmary, Maura toward the cabins. She clenches and unclenches her hands as she walks, an old habit she thought she had broken. That small, dark chamber at the back of her mind in which dwell all her memories of babes too small to live – she must slam shut its door; she must lock it. October 24^th, 1899, she reminds herself. Maura Franklin. Not crazy. Needed here.

She finds Tove seated on the edge of the bed in her cabin, every muscle in her body clenched in pain. Her knuckles are white as she grips the bedpost; Ada, beside her, is quieter than Maura has ever seen her. Tove looks up at Maura with resignation, rather than panic, in her eyes. “Det er for tidligt,” she breathes.

“I know. But you’re going to be just fine. You’re stronger than you think. You’re going to be fine.” She grips Tove’s face between her fingers and tilts her face up just as she did at their first meeting, forces Tove to look her in the eye. “You hear me?”

She and Ada help Tove out of the heavy woollen dress and bulky leather shoes she has been wearing all week so they can settle her onto the bed in her shift. “Just breathe. That’s all you need to do now.”

“Du skal tage dybe indåndinger,” Ada translates in a whisper. Maura pushes her own sleeves up her arms again to free her wrists, spares a moment to be grateful that she has been foregoing a corset these last few days at sea. It is going to be a long day.

There is a knock at the door, and Maura excuses herself to speak to Franz in the hallway. “No nurses, no midwives,” he tells her. “It’s mostly men in steerage.”

“Alright.” She forces herself not to show her disappointment. “Alright. That’s fine. Thank you for checking.”

Without another word, he turns to go. “And Franz?” she interrupts. “Can you take Ada with you, keep her occupied for today?”

Ada makes a wordless sound of protest. Maura starts, surprised to find her in the doorway, listening.

“Ada, listen to me,” Maura says quickly, kneeling to look her directly in the eyes. “This will be easier for your sister if she doesn’t have to worry about you, too. You understand that – I know you do.” Ada bites her lip – a gesture Maura suspects the girl has absorbed from her. “Franz is going to show you how the ship navigates, alright?”

Reluctantly, Ada follows Franz down the hallway. She glances back twice, and each time Maura tries to smile at her encouragingly.

Back inside, Maura sits down beside Tove and squeezes her hand, feels the bite of her nails, helps her count her exhales. She is reluctant to do much else until Eyk arrives with an antiseptic – she knows too much about puerperal fever to not take all the possible precautions.

Memories come back to her unbidden. Chloroform, sweet and sharp. Linens soaked in blood. The tearing pain that was the only thing still linking her to the twisted, swollen, foreign thing that was her body. Drifting away into a world of bright, white light. Keep it together, she thinks fiercely. You’re needed here.

Still, Eyk’s knock on the door is a relief. “I found what you asked for,” he tells her, setting down the case he is carrying and opening its lid to show her. “Is there anything else I can do?”

Pray, she thinks grimly as she sets about disinfecting her hands, but she shakes her head, not wanting Tove to overhear and guess her meaning.

“Vent,” Tove says hoarsely. She clears her throat, tries again. “Warte.” Eyk wavers in the doorway for a moment but goes to her side when she extends a hand to him. They have an intense, whispered conversation of which Maura cannot make out a single word.

“She’s worried about Ada,” Eyk tells her once Tove has stopped talking and let her head sink back against her pillow. “I told her we’ll look after her no matter what happens.” He hesitates. “You should have her change positions. If she’s on her knees, the pressure on her back will be less.” 

He was once a father of three, Maura is reminded. He probably knows more about childbirth than she does, having never managed it. “Alright. Can you ask her if she wants the chloroform? Tell her – tell her she will still be conscious, but she will feel like she is in a dream.”

Tove’s anxious agreement in response to Eyk’s question needs no translation. He helps her shift onto her knees, while Maura holds the chloroform dropper bottle up to the light as she saw one of her professors do in a London lecture hall all those years ago. The gap between the dose required for analgesia and the dose that causes the heart to fail is narrow, she remembers him saying. Carefully, she places four drops onto a handkerchief and covers Tove’s nose and mouth with it. Tove’s eyes, already glassy, grow vague, her gaze drifting up toward the back of her head. Her hands, grasping the bedframe, twitch and then relax.

Eyk squeezes those slackening fingers once and touches Maura’s upper back briefly in reassurance before he leaves.

Time seems to expand endlessly and contract unexpectedly. Were it not for the pocket watch still ticking on the bedside table, Maura would have no idea how many hours have passed by the time Tove’s waters have broken, her contractions have become strong enough to be felt even through the haze of the chloroform, and her cervix, as best as Maura can tell, is fully dilated. With her hand on Tove’s back, Maura can sense the moment that the instinct to push takes over, and then there is little left for her to do except place cool damp cloths against Tove’s face and try to keep her perineum from tearing.

If it were happening at forty weeks instead of thirty-two, it would be a textbook labour. The baby’s white-blond head emerges like a tiny translucent star far outweighed by the planets orbiting it. And once that head is free it happens so quickly, the body falling into Maura’s hands as easily as liquid.

Maura clears the fluid from the baby’s minute face. His chest expands as he sucks in air, and when it empties again, Tove looks up at his scream.

“Giv ham til mig,” she breathes. He is small enough to fit into her two cupped hands and as pale and bulbous as a sea creature, but his voice is strong. He intends to survive.

Part III: Eyk

Night has long fallen by the time Maura sends one of the stewards to tell him that Tove has a living son. Ada abandons her examination of the ship’s telegraph, which he has been explaining to her, and pulls him bodily towards Tove’s cabin.

“Sei vorsichtig,” he warns her before he lets her open the door. Her nod is impatient, but to her credit, she does heed him: she lets Maura scrub her hands clean before anything else, and then she crawls onto Tove’s bed and curls up into her sister’s side with the utmost care. Tove’s eyes flutter open, and for the first time, Eyk sees her smile.

Maura’s hair has come loose from its pins and is now pulled into a loose plait down her back. Her clothes are probably past salvaging, damp and bloodied as they are, but he is certain she has never looked so lovely. He flexes his hand in an effort to forget how the knobs of her spine felt through her blouse when he touched her back this afternoon.

“Stay with her,” Maura says briskly. “Disinfect your hands if you’re going to get close. I need to fetch something from the infirmary.”

“Wollen Sie – ihn halten?” Tove asks tentatively.

Eyk looks down at his weathered hands, tries to imagine what kind of grime has worked its way into his calluses. “Lieber nicht,” he decides. It has been years since he last held an infant as newly born as this one. Hanna arrived while he was at sea and was nearly two weeks old by the time he met her. So it would have been Sophie. Eleven years and a lifetime ago.

Instead, he watches Ada murmur to the baby in Danish. The occasional phrase is similar enough to its German counterpart for him to catch her meaning. Don’t make promises, a part of him wants to warn her. But it would be insincere, when he has done the exact same thing a hundred times over – silently, inadvertently – since he stepped into this room.

Maura returns a half-hour later, having devised what she calls a crude isolette from spare materials she found in the infirmary. “Infants born this early often cannot produce their own heat,” she explains as she shows him her contraption: a glass-lidded wooden box with a hot-water bottle stitched into its flannel lining. “This will help keep him warm. He also needs to be kept isolated from any sickness and fed at regular intervals – by gavage if needed, although I don’t think it will be.”

She pauses, as if overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task that faces them if they mean to keep this tiny, fragile creature among the living. They are set to reach land tomorrow, they all know. Soon, they will go their separate ways.

“We’ll manage,” Eyk says. A promise.

Part IV: Olek

It has been odd, going through his day without Jérôme. Over the course of their brief acquaintance, Olek has grown accustomed to having someone at his side. Perhaps it is not surprising that he took to this so quickly; he is – or was – a twin, after all, and is used to not being the one that people’s gazes go to.

But Jérôme is confined to his berth and required to stay off his injured legs for the rest of the journey, meaning that Olek is taking his dinner to the lifeboat deck alone once again.

He is nearly halfway through his bread ration when he realizes that he is not, in fact, alone. He hears a delicate clearing of the throat, and then the shadows behind one of the lifeboats shift to reveal Ling Yi.

“Hello,” he says carefully, striving to sound casual.

She says something in her impenetrably musical language. Tentatively, she extends toward him the bundle she is carrying. His jacket, he realizes – he had half-forgotten she still had it.

“Thank you.” He shrugs into it, relieved to have a shield against the evening chill and yet a little disappointed that she no longer has anything to remember him by. “Jesteś głodna?” In a mirror of her earlier motion, he extends the remaining crust of his bread toward her. “Food?”

She shakes her head and indicates that he should eat it himself. It would feel discourteous to do so while she watches, he decides, so he splits the bread into two equally sized pieces, and she accepts the half where she declined the whole.

It tastes a little sweeter for being shared.

Silence blankets them while they eat and after. Then Ling Yi says something else – more words than he has ever heard from her. He thinks it might be a confession. He thinks it might be a goodbye.

If he knew for sure it was the former, and if he had the words in her language he would need to respond, he thinks he would share a confession of his own. He would tell her how much his village changed over the course of his lifetime – although those changes are trivial compared to the ones seen by his parents, who were young when the first oil wells were dug in Bóbrka. Still, he would tell her about the eruption of frenetic activity that followed the sale of their fields to a Canadian oilman, how the desperate flooded into Galicia to make their fortunes, or at least a living. He would tell her how lawlessness took hold. He would tell her that he thinks it was one of McGarvey’s own men who wrapped his arm, uninvited, around Magda’s waist that snowy evening; that the man was laughing at first, then grew rough when she tried to pull away. He would tell her that it was mere chance that he was there and not his brother. That he had not meant to make blood pool from that man’s split temple – that he only ever meant to make him stop – but that something vicious and unknowable awoke in him when he struck the first blow. He would tell her that he and his brother are – were – identical, but that this was the first time that one of them was mistaken for the other. That everyone assumed Józef – the bold one, the strong one, the one whom Magda married – had been the one brawling on the street that night. That Józef was the one the bleeding man’s friends killed in retribution. That Józef was still alive, barely, when Olek returned home from the mines that evening, that his brother’s last word was “Uciekaj.” Go. That Józef, who always led while Olek followed, was, in the end, the one who stayed behind.

He suspects, without having any real reason to do so, that she would understand.

Once Ling Yi has left, there is little reason for Olek to stay by the lifeboats. He is not looking where he is going when he leaves and so nearly runs into someone in the passageway that leads to the crew’s quarters. “Przepraszam,” he says, stepping aside without looking up. But the woman blocking his way does not brush past him.

His first thought, when he meets her eyes, is that such an elegant young woman could not possibly belong in this part of the ship. His second is that he recognizes her – she is one half of the wealthy, well-dressed couple who secured Jérôme’s place on this ship.

“You are Olek?” she asks gently. Her voice is melodious, but her accent is strong and unfamiliar, and it is a struggle for him to understand.

“Yes. Olek.”

“I – I thank you. For helping Jérôme.”

“Why – how –” Olek twists his tongue around the words. “You know him? How?”

She shakes her head, smiling slightly. “I do not know him. I only met him here, on the ship. But Lucien – my husband – and Jérôme, they were in the war together. In Madagascar. Four years ago. My husband –” She breaks off, swallows hard. “My husband did a terrible thing to Jérôme. Now Lucien is dying. His seizures, they get worse and worse. He wanted to – how do you say – to make it right. Jérôme on the ship, all of us here – it means he can try, now, while there is still time.”

Olek thinks back to the first time he saw her – the force with which she argued, the way her gaze and gestures were always drawn back to his friend. She did not seem like a woman arguing dutifully on her husband’s behalf.

Although he does not voice his disbelief, she seems to sense it. “Everything I have, my life, it is not mine or Lucien’s. It was Jérôme who paid for it. And he is a good man. I could see it when we first spoke, it was so clear. He deserves better than –” She gestures vaguely, encompassing the ship, the bunker in which Jérôme hid, the engine room where he now toils, and whatever awaits him when they reach the shore. “I will make sure that his life, in the New World, is better.”

With that, she pulls an odd triangular hairpin from her hair and hands it to him. Even in the dim light of the passage, it glints enough for him to suspect that it is gold.

“Sell it. Or keep it. It is for you. For helping Jérôme.”

He shakes his head, tries to hand it back to her – but she is already stepping away in a gesture of refusal, tucking her hands into her voluminous sleeves.

“Please. Take it. I cannot keep it. It belongs to someone else. To someone I used to be.”

Chapter Text

Part I: Tove  

Early in the morning of their last day aboard the Kerberos, once Maura has taken Ada to the dining saloon for breakfast and the baby’s pre-dawn fussing has subsided, Tove asks a porter to find her father down in steerage and bring him here to her.

Anker arrives with his hat in his hands, revealing hair turning from greyish blond to white. He listens without interrupting while she explains, as matter-of-factly as she can, what she and Krester and Ada have planned and what she wants from him. Afterward, he is silent for a long time. Then, her father, who does not believe in God, lays his hand on the lid of the baby’s makeshift incubator and says a quiet blessing over him before brushing his knuckles against Tove’s cheek, putting his hat back on, and leaving without another word. 

One day she will parse through the tangled web of all her feelings, and then there will likely be tears or raging at the sky. But for now, she feels preternaturally calm, as though her heart is wrapped in cotton wool, as insulated as the baby in his box. She settles back against the headboard to watch him. Her son. The reality of his wizened little face has obviated all the nightmares she had of him while she carried him – of sharp-clawed dragon-like monsters, or scaled-down versions of the landowner, with beard and callused hands and all.

Although she had every intention of waiting until he is a little older and these dangerous first few days have passed, she finds herself thinking about names already. “Magnus?” she tries out loud. “Hvordan lyder det?” In his sleep, the baby purses his mouth into an expression of clear disapproval. “Eller ikke,” she decides.

Through the cabin’s door and porthole, she can hear her fellow passengers awakening and venturing out into the hallways. The excitement in their voices verges on impatience. Tove expects that Ada and Krester will soon be among the crowds gathering along the railing, if they are not already – her siblings will not want to miss their first glimpse of New York.

Tove feels only a slight pang of regret at being still too sore to contemplate joining them. She has far more time left than she thought she did – an overwhelming abundance of it, in fact. She is content, for now, to wait.

Part II: Maura

“Where do you go next?” Maura sets her near-full teacup down. Her throat almost closed against her last sip; she dares not hazard another.

“Directly back to Southampton,” Eyk says from across the captain’s table. Ada, seated between them, is falling asleep over her toast – hardly surprising after the anxious late night they have all had. Eyk smoothly moves her plate out of the way before her hair can land in the marmalade. “Then – I’m not sure. I’ll have to make inquiries, see how soon I can find another command.”

He meant it, then, when he said he would not continue to work for her father. “I’m sorry if I made you feel that you have to leave your place here,” she says. She shifts in her seat; although it was only a few days that she went without her corset, it was enough to make her grow unused to it, and she sits a little stiffly as she tries to adjust to it again. “That wasn’t my intention.”

Eyk frowns. He has not touched his own tea, either. “I can hardly blame you. And in any case – the idea of a change is not unwelcome.” 

Maura reaches for her tea again, purely out of habit, then thinks better of it. Her sleeve rides up from the motion, and she realizes with a start that her bruises are all but gone. The sight of her unblemished wrist is disconcerting; she blinks twice, hard, and looks away. Her eyes settle on the mural looming over them – Prometheus wreathed in chains, twin ships pulled into a whirlpool, Nyx drawing her cloak of darkness close. “It’s rather an odd choice for a dining room, is it not?” she comments, nodding toward it.

Eyk turns in his seat to follow her gaze. “Perhaps the shipping company thought it would save them money on food if they found a way to dampen people’s appetites,” he suggests. It takes her a moment to realize he is joking. She laughs in surprise, and in response, his eyes crinkle with his smile.

Outside, the ship’s bell is rung, signalling the turning of the hour. “I’ll be needed on the bridge soon,” Eyk says, making to rise from his seat. He hands her a folded piece of notepaper. “This is the address where Tove and her family will be staying. I’m taking them there this evening, once everyone else has disembarked. You’ll check on them?”

“Every day,” she promises. “For as long as it takes.”

He tugs his sleeves straight, checks that the buttons of his jacket are fastened. He is playing for time, Maura realizes. “Could I call on you?” he finally asks. “When I’m next in New York?”

“I’d like that.” She smiles, letting it transform her face entirely. “I’d like that a great deal.”

She wishes he could at least give her a sense of whether it will be weeks or months before he is able to return. But she knows she will have to learn to live with this uncertainty – to trust that, sooner or later, the tides will sweep him back to New York’s shore, knowing that when they do, she will be waiting for him.

Every journey must come to an end, after all.

Part III: Olek

The ship docks shortly before noon, but it is nearing evening by the time the activity in the engine room has died down enough for Olek to scrub the coal dust from his face and chest as best he can and head up onto the deck for his first view of New York Harbour. He had been hoping for one last glimpse of Ling Yi, but she and the rest of the passengers are long gone by then – with two exceptions. Clémence and Lucien are just stepping off the gangway; Jérôme, having traded his coal-stained uniform for an unremarkable dark suit, walks beside them, a freshly brushed bowler hat in his hands.

Jérôme and all his mysteries. Olek still does not know for sure what brought him to board the Kerberos – was he looking to take revenge, or, perhaps, to grant forgiveness? What did he say to Clémence at their first meeting to win her over quite so thoroughly? How did she know to come on deck to help him at the exact moment that he needed her?

Perhaps one day, they will meet again on the streets of New York, having both learned enough English to have a proper conversation. Perhaps then, Olek will get the chance to ask. In the meantime, the questions he mulls over can serve as a dam against the rush of all his memories: blood and oil across a snowy side street, his brother’s hand turning stiff and cold.

Olek pats his trouser pocket, reassuring himself that the postcard is still there to tell him where to go from here. He wonders if the other Olek will mistake him for his brother. He suspects that that was Józef’s intention when he handed Olek the missive and told him – ordered him – to go, but over the course of his journey Olek has resolved to clear up any confusion.

There is virtue in knowing who you are, he has realized – as well as who you might be.

Part IV: Eyk

It has been nearly two years, five months, and two weeks since the fire.

In the beginning Eyk counted the hours, then the days, and now the weeks. Time has begun to blur together that which was once as painful and distinctive as each pulse of blood beneath a bruise, and the tide of his grief is starting to recede as all tides must.

The sun is setting. He has seen Tove, Krester, Ada, and the as-of-yet-unnamed baby safely to the door of their new home. He can only imagine how much they will have changed by the time he next sees them. The baby learning to lift his head and babble in a language of his own invention; Ada growing taller, her face losing the roundness of childhood and the wisps of hair around her face darkening from white to blond; the hollows under Tove’s eyes filling out.

Eyk lights the lamp on his desk so he can finish filling out the logbook, the last task that remains for him today. The whiskey bottle in his desk drawer is still half full, he realizes when he sits down; lately he has been reaching for it less and less.

Although he has dutifully recorded the death of a sailor, a storm, a fire, and a baby born two months too early, there is a great deal still that the logbook does not say. A stowaway with a great capacity for violence and a greater still capacity to refrain from it. A doctor with steady hands and the smell of sea salt in her hair. A coal stoker who saw the ocean for the first time. A girl who learned how a telegraph works.

Eyk turns the pen between his thumb and forefinger, considers the space at the bottom of the page that he could fill. No need, he decides. He will remember. He closes the logbook and extinguishes the lamp on his desk by pinching out the flame.

Outside, along the pavements of New York, the streetlamps flicker on.                                                                                                                       

Chapter Text

Part I: Eyk

Eyk has scarcely stepped through the front door when Ada collides into him, throwing her arms around his waist. “Hello to you, too,” he laughs, taking a step backward to steady himself.  

“I missed you,” she says into the fabric of his suit coat. His heart squeezes, but he just ruffles her hair in response. Ada is now a good ten centimetres taller than she was when he first met her, speaks American-accented English as fluently as any lifelong New Yorker, and looks the very picture of a diligent schoolgirl in her starched white blouse – Tove keeps her scrupulously clean – with her flaxen hair in two long dangling plaits. 

“Where’s Rune?” he asks her. She points up at the landing above them, where Rune is practising standing by clinging to the balusters. Almost one year old now, he is still small for his age, but what he lacks in size he makes up for with sheer determination.

Eyk ascends the staircase to kneel beside the baby. “Hello, little one.” Tove has strict rules about only English being spoken to her son. “Remember me?” Rune gives him a suspicious look but allows himself to be picked up and settles himself happily enough against Eyk’s shoulder.

Eyk’s own permanent residence continues to be the captain’s cabin on his ship, as it has been since the fire, but last year, when he started to worry about what tenement ventilation would do to the baby, he finally sold what remained of the old manor house in the north German woods – mostly the land on which it stood – and bought this second-floor apartment in a modest but respectable part of New York for Tove and Krester and the children to live in. Ada has left its door ajar; through it, Eyk can see that the front room is as neat and well-kept as ever, aside from the stacks of books that seem to be proliferating everywhere.

Ada grabs his hand and leads him inside. “Tove and Krester are both working late today,” she explains.  That means Mrs. Martin, their third-floor neighbour, is periodically checking in on the children throughout the afternoon, although she probably heard Eyk’s entrance and made herself scarce. The woman hates him; she has assumed, reasonably enough, that he is the children’s absentee father, and she mutters angrily to herself about his needing to do right by their mother whenever he is within earshot. He has not bothered to correct her.

“Can you help me with my homework?” Ada asks, interrupting his reverie with practicalities. They shift a few of the books around to make room for him to sit down next to her at the kitchen table, Rune settled on his lap. Ada hands Eyk the list of words she needs to learn for her next dictation, and he tests her on their spelling, throwing in a maritime navigation term every now and again to keep her on her toes. She is unfazed, and makes no mistakes, as usual. “See? You didn’t need my help,” he teases. Ada grins back at him.

Since he was a boy, no older than Ada is now, he has spent more time at sea than on land. For years, whenever his foot touched solid ground, a part of him would start to count the days until he could board a ship again. Now, without his realizing it, things have reversed – when he is at sea he is, at all times, aware of the distance between him and New York Harbour, of how long it will be before he can again listen to Ada’s chatter, breathe in Rune’s milk-and-talcum scent, or watch Krester and Tove smirk at each other across the kitchen table in reaction to a joke only the two of them can understand. And Maura – Maura is always on his mind. The way she catches her lip between her teeth when she is thinking, the freckle at her wrist and its twin at the corner of her shoulder blade, the pattern of veins beneath the tender skin on the insides of her thighs, her incisive comments and sardonic sense of humour, how her collarbones sweep outward from the base of her throat like the wings of a bird in flight.

“Are you going to see Maura today?” Ada asks, startling him a little with her seeming ability to read his mind. “Do you have a ring?” she adds, pragmatically.

“Mind your own business,” he grumbles, no bite behind the words. But he is, indeed, about to go see Maura – her Friday afternoon lecture should be ending right about now, and Rune is falling asleep against his shoulder. He lays the baby into his cot and then wraps Ada in a hug and squeezes tightly. “Look after yourself,” he reminds her. “I’ll come again tomorrow.”

She rolls her eyes. When did she learn to do that? “You don’t have to worry about me,” she says impatiently.

But, of course, he does.

Out on the pavement, he turns back to tip his hat in response to Ada’s waving from the window. Then he buttons his coat against the autumn chill and steps onto the street, letting the swirl of foot traffic sweep him inexorably, if temporarily, away.

Part II: Olek

Captain Larsen moved Olek out of the engine room of the Nereid just a month after hiring him last winter, meaning that Olek has been a porter for about nine months now; Larsen has also been training him in the use of the ship’s navigation and communication systems for nearly as long. Olek has not explicitly been promised another promotion, but he is quite sure one is coming. Larsen abhors waste; he would hardly offer someone training unless he expected to also offer them the chance to use it.

All in all, Olek’s latest crossing has little in common with his first, on the Kerberos a year ago, when his days were filled with flame and smoke and his nights with fear and guilt. It is different, too, in that when Olek disembarks in New York in search of a hot meal and the chance to adjust to walking on solid land again, someone is waiting on the docks for him.

It takes him several moments to recognize Ling Yi. Gone are the layers of colourful silk she once swathed herself in, the ornaments that crowned her hair, and the paint that gave her the face of a porcelain doll. Without them, she is slight and daintily pretty and even younger than she seemed.

She blinks hard at the sight of him, and he realizes he must look different too, clean and uniformed and neatly groomed as he always is these days.

“Hello,” he tries, wondering if she has learned as much English over the course of the past year as he has.  

“Hello,” she responds. “It is so good to see you.” She puts her arms around him, gingerly at first, and then with more feeling. Without ever consciously deciding to, he finds himself hugging her back. “I look for you for many months.”

“How did you find me?”

“I look at every newspaper I find for ship schedules,” she explains with a delicate one-shouldered shrug. The rhythm of her speech is halting, but her vocabulary is thorough and her meaning clear. “At first, I come here whenever the Kerberos is here. I think you are still working on it. Then I see that the captain of the Kerberos has a new ship. I think maybe you are with him. I start coming to the docks whenever the Nereid is here. And here you are.”

Olek realizes they are still standing in the middle of the gangway, blocking the dockworkers’ path. He dares not propose they go find somewhere to eat for fear she would find the idea improper. “Walk with me?” he suggests instead.

“Do you like working on ships?” she asks politely as they wind their way through the port district.

“Yes,” he says, honestly enough. It is better, at least, than the back-breaking work that Józef’s friend was able to find for him after Olek admitted that he would not be suited for teacher training like Józef would have been. The other Olek was more than kind and helped him a great deal during the first few weeks after his arrival, but it became clear soon enough that Olek needed to find his own way. “Do you like –” He breaks off, realizing he has no idea how, or if, she is now earning her living.

Ling Yi smiles slightly. “– working in a garment factory?” she finishes for him. “It is alright. For now.”

There is a litany of follow-up questions he could ask, but this version of Ling Yi seems so much calmer and more content than the girl he found trying to disappear herself into a crate that he decides to keep his questions to himself for now.

“If you want a better position,” he begins instead. “I have an idea, maybe. My friend works for a woman uptown, a widow who manages her dead husband’s very large estate.” This is, Olek knows, not a very good explanation of Jérôme and Clémence’s relationship; they are, in fact, partners in growing and donating Lucien’s ill-gotten fortune, as they are in all things. The two of them have a connection that defies description, and that Olek does not pretend to comprehend. Jérôme once told him that he and Clémence understood each other from their very first chance meeting on the covered deck of the Kerberos, that they were the same kind of person underneath all their differences. That it was a coincidence that Clémence overheard his fight with Franz that day, but inevitable that she should intervene on his behalf. “The house is near Doctor Parkhurst’s church. It is easy to find. You could go there and show them this.” He pulls Clémence’s hair pin from his pocket, where it has joined the postcard as his good luck charm. “Tell them you know me. They can help.”

Ling Yi turns to study his face as they walk. “Or you can show me the way there,” she suggests lightly.

He smiles, as pleased as he is surprised. “Alright,” he says.

She squeezes his hand, and together they turn to cross the street.

Part III: Tove

“You must learn to nurse by reason rather than rule, for no rule can be laid down to which exceptions will not arise,” the Superintendent of Nurses reminds her class yet again, thereby dismissing them from the lecture hall. Tove hopes the brisk walk back to Men’s Ward B will shake her out of the daze of exhaustion that she usually finds herself in by the end of the Superintendent’s classes; she still has six hours remaining of her shift today.

She straightens the stiffly starched cotton cap fastened to her pinned-up hair, reties her apron more tightly around her corseted waist, and squares her shoulders before entering the ward’s linen closet, preparing to spend the rest of the day scrubbing, pressing, and mending.

Not for the first time, she wonders if all this is worth it. There are times when sour fellow students, insufferable patients, and impossible-to-please head nurses make her long for the days when she was a farmer’s daughter, out in the fields with only the buzzing of insects and her family’s shouted instructions to bother her. She misses the earthy, sweet smells of farm life; the relief of stepping into the shade of a forest to escape the summer sun; seeing Ada traipsing up the path at the end of the school day; and laying down her work at eventide.

But those days are long gone, she reminds herself, and even the memory of them is bitter. She wants this – a diploma with her name on it, the respect and authority that a uniform brings, a good example set for Ada, the promise of the more challenging and less monotonous work that is soon to be hers. She does not want a factory position like Krester has, doing the same thing day in and day out for as far into the future as the eye can see.

There is a small commotion out in the hallway just then – shoes scuffed against the linoleum; voices raised in urgency – as a new patient is brought in in a wheeled chair. He is fair and bearded, and for a moment Tove sees her father in him, as she has in nearly every other man who has walked or been carried through these doors. Then she blinks, and the man is a stranger again.

“Do you know him?” one of the other nurses-in-training asks politely.

Tove shakes her head. “He only reminded me of someone.”

“I do it, too, you know.” The other woman’s smile turns wry. “Seeing ghosts, I mean.”

He’s not a ghost, Tove wants to say. But she needs to cut this conversation short – as a matter of principle, she keeps her distance from her classmates, who all seem to spend their spare time gossiping about young men and complaining about their too-strict mothers. How could she explain any part of her life to them – her fatherless baby; the promises she has made to Ada; the unbridgeable distance between her and her parents; the brief, impenetrable postcards Franz sometimes sends her from distant lands; Eyk’s too-infrequent visits and Maura’s well-hidden but growing frustration with the way their fragile courtship has slipped into stasis; Krester’s occasional late-night disappearances; her dreams of crushed skulls and tearing pain and gunpowder, of blood streaking down her skirt.

“Thank you,” she says brusquely instead, and she retreats into the linen closet, closing the door behind her. She smooths out the sheet she is pressing. The head nurse will be here soon to check on her, and Tove wants her to be pleasantly surprised with her progress.

And if she sometimes dreams of running until there is no breath left in her lungs, of stepping into the sea and letting the waves fold over her head like hands in prayer, of clawing her way out of this body that has toiled and bled and healed and wept and letting what remains of it feed the fungi and the flowers, if she sometimes dreams of letting her clawed-hand grip on this life of hers loosen, perhaps it is enough that she makes sure those dreams stay only dreams. It is the New World at the dawn of a new century. She has a great deal left to do.

Part IV: Maura

There are fifty pairs of eyes on Maura as she stands at the heart of the amphitheatre, putting the finishing touches on the multi-coloured chalk diagram of the brain that sprawls across the row of blackboards behind her. “The brain drives our thoughts, our behaviour. It holds all the secrets of the universe,” she begins. “There is a whole hidden world inside each one of us which only needs to be deciphered.”

Most of her students are listening dutifully, notebooks open and pens in hand. Some are gazing out the window or picking at their fingernails, but a few – a slight, dark woman, younger than the rest, in the front row; a drably dressed redhead in the corner – are leaning forward in interest, eyes bright. The young woman in the front hangs back after the lecture to ask a series of questions about glial cells. Maura smiles at her as she packs up her books afterward, thinking she may have just found her next research assistant, and the woman smiles back.

A streetcar ride and a long, brisk walk later, Maura arrives at her brother’s door. The neatly swept front steps and the profusion of white and purple flowers in the window boxes have her sister-in-law written all over them; Ciaran, like Maura, is far too absent-minded to keep so many plants alive. Although Ciaran and Alice both keep reminding her how welcome she is in their home, it is still their home, and Maura tends to traverse it on tiptoes.  Between her faculty position and her own small but growing practice, she has enough money for rooms of her own elsewhere, and a part of her longs for her own space. But after everything that happened in Morefield and in London, she has learned to be exceedingly cautious about respectability, for Eyk’s sake as well as her own, and so she rarely goes anywhere except to work without the company of her brother or sister-in-law. Sometimes, like a warning, she still dreams of weightlessness and icy water, of her wrists rubbed raw.

“How was your lecture?” Alice appears in the hallway to ask as Maura unpins her hat. Freckled, bespectacled, and neat as a pin, Alice rarely makes eye contact or raises her voice above a whisper; at first, Maura thought her sister-in-law resented her, but eventually she realized that Alice is simply shy, and glad to have a friend even if she does not often show it.

“Good, I think. No one fell asleep, at least.”

Ciaran will not return from the office until much later in the evening, so the two of them settle down for a quiet afternoon of paperwork – Maura reviewing her patients’ case files, Alice the household accounts. But Maura has scarcely taken out her pen when there is a knock at the door.

“Eyk,” she exclaims, forgetting to hide her delight. “I wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow.”

“We made good time.” He shrugs as if it matters little, but she can tell he is pleased to have surprised her.

Even though he has been visiting her every few weeks for months now, she is still unused to the sight of him out of uniform. His suit is grey-blue and slightly too large for his narrow frame, the collar very white against his suntanned throat.

“Do you want to come in? Would you like tea? Are you hungry?”

“Actually, would you walk with me?”

“Of course. Let me just get my hat.”

Summer has ended as quickly as it began, and the late-afternoon air is cool. Even wrapped in her cloak, Maura stays close to Eyk’s side as they walk, trying to absorb his warmth. He was gone nearly two months this time, and she has missed him.

“I saw Rune and Ada,” he tells her. She tamps down a ridiculous stab of jealousy that he visited the children before her.

“Growing like a weed, isn’t he?”

“Yes, he’s quite sturdy now,” he smiles. “I do worry about them, though, on their own so much of the time. They have Tove on such terribly long shifts at the hospital –”

“They’re not on their own, Eyk,” she reminds him. “Their neighbour watches them. I’m over there as often as I can be. And once Tove has her diploma, her schedule will be better.”

“Still –”

“You worry too much.” She squeezes his arm. “You’ve done so much for them. And they’re thriving.”

She realizes they are not headed down their usual path, toward the harbour; instead, Eyk has led them toward the small, slightly underkept garden where Maura sometimes walks with Rune when he is too restless to nap except in motion.

He intends to propose, Maura realizes. It is good timing. She would have had to bring it up if he was not going to. She has not bled since before his last visit, and two missed cycles is one too many for her to dismiss.

“Maura, I –” He breaks off, clears his throat, tries again. “I know we’ve talked about – but I wanted to ask –”

“Yes?” She could put him out of his misery, but she is rather enjoying this too much.

“I wanted to ask you to marry me,” he blurts out. She can tell this is not going the way he meant it to. “Sorry, this isn’t – I meant to get a ring. And I know I can’t offer you much.” She rolls her eyes, but he does not notice as he continues. “I know you could find someone younger, someone with less… but this will be better for the children. We can find a home of our own, and they can live there with us, the four of them. We can give them a proper family, and –”

“Eyk!” She laughs. “Are you going to let me answer?”

When she says yes, he wraps his arms around her, one hand curled low on her waist, the other spreading across her upper back, where her corset gives way to her shoulder blade. By instinct, her left hand goes to its habitual position, tangled in his hair. Even out of uniform, he smells of the sea, of that blend of leather and salt and sweat and smoke that she will forever associate with the Kerberos. He kisses her gently, as if she is made of porcelain, a habit she thought she had coaxed him out of. But she understands – how fragile and impermanent such moments can feel, how strong the urge to keep them from splitting at their seams.

“There’s an opening at the shipping company’s New York office,” he whispers in her ear, so low she almost fears she is imagining it. “I’m going to apply for it.”

“Are you sure?” she whispers back.

“I’ve been at sea for almost as long as I can remember,” he says by way of an answer. “It’s past time I found a shore to stay on. Don’t let it get to your head, though,” he warns her playfully. “It’s not for your sake. It’s for the children.”

She laughs as they continue walking and she takes his arm again. “I wouldn’t dream of thinking anything else.”

They are heading toward the harbour now; although they still have some way to go, Maura knows what they will see once they arrive – the Nereid looming above the dockworkers’ domain while sailors as tiny as ants scurry about her decks. From without, the Nereid seems as bulky and foreboding as the Kerberos before her, but having been inside, Maura could not possibly mistake her for her predecessor – the Nereid is better lit and carpeted in soothing sea-green rather than oppressive crimson. Her owners also do not feel the need to plaster their company’s symbol everywhere.

Maura hopes Eyk will make one last voyage on what he perhaps always knew would be his last ship. They have time, after all, and Maura would like to join him.

“I have some news for you, too,” she begins.

~fin~