I woke to hard knocking at the door. Night had fallen and there was no indication that Uncle Ormond and Aunt Susan had returned. I wondered if they had forgotten their key. I threw on a dressing gown and slippers, dashed to the door and opened it.
My brother Michael stood there, hair askew and plastered to his forehead, his face ashen in the pale light of the gaslamp above the entryway.
“Michael, what is it? What’s wrong? Is it the baby?”
“No, he’s fine. But Poppy, there has been a terrible disaster on the Thames.”
“What?”
He brushed past me and we stood in the foyer. “A paddleboat. A paddleboat and some kind of iron cargo boat collided.”
“What?”
“Just a few hours ago,” Michael said, breathlessly. “Around half seven near Tripcock Point and Galleons Reach.”
“My God, Michael, no!”
“I am on my way to Roff’s Pier, to the steamboat offices, to see if I can be of assistance. Will you come?”
I cast off my slumber with my slippers, hastily changed and grabbed Uncle’s medical bag, which, unlike my own, contained the most advanced surgical instruments and medications.
When we got to the pier, it was chaos and mayhem. Hundreds of people had already gathered to try to learn more about the extent of the wreck on the river and to try to find relatives and friends who had been aboard the Princess Alice.
The boat named for the princess, I thought, again recalling Effie’s words.
20
I had thought that no horror could match what I had witnessed in Norfolk at the train collision. Too soon, I was proved wrong.
Chaos, panic, and mayhem really do not adequately describe the scene on Roff’s Pier. Londoners were accustomed to fog, fire, riots, murders, and war - certainly war - but to witness the aftermath of this catastrophe right here on the Thames, to know that hundreds of passengers who had gleefully boarded the paddleboat near London Bridge that morning would never be seen again, was unfathomable.
Uncle had, over the years, become somewhat calloused to affliction and pain, and at the train wreck, I had somehow forced myself to harden, to momentarily filter out the gore and tragedy and misery enough to treat the injured, to move from one patient to the next, as is required in triage situations. My uncle’s words at the train wreck when I started to fall apart echoed in my mind now. “Get hold.”
But I was still often governed by my emotions, still vulnerable to empathy, perhaps because I refused to lose it, choosing rather to harbour that attribute to some degree, or perhaps Sherlock had awakened in me emotions that I had chosen to bury before.
Although Sherlock’s general admonishment of religion still rang in my ears, I found myself briefly given to prayer. Though my great joy came from immersing myself in living in the present and how I might impact people’s lives and be of help through my profession, and though I was reluctant to rely upon any promise of a ‘better place,’ I suppose I was unable to entirely abandon my faith. The particular brand of despair I was about to face once again - irrevocable injury and loss, fear, grief, sorrow and death... and the inconsolable people who were left behind... forced me to summon to my mind a kinder motif in the hereafter for the lost souls. I longed to believe in heaven, in a spot in the beyond with trees ripe with buds that hang like tapioca pearls and rosy blossoms. A place with humming rivers and streams, where babies, pink and wrinkled, remain forever nestled in soft grace and peaceful slumber. A place where aching eyes lift to the white trails of drifting clouds as the heavens filled with the sound of a choir of angels, whose throats swell with a fiercely joyous hymn.
As I treated the people who had almost drowned, I could not help but ponder those still in that river, and the immensity of the loss was almost too much to bear. It seemed to me that even the most heartless and insenstive person would forever see this madness in his dreams.
But there were those who found it within themselves to gather the facts and tell the affrighted, waiting world the number of casualties, the details, the news as it evolved. This task, and discerning exactly what had caused the calamity, fell to the reporters, spewing the information to the telegraph clerks at the post office, and to the authorities. And, of course, to Sherlock Holmes.
I did not seek out Sherlock nor did I see him at the London Steamboat Company’s office at the wharf. Michael and I were too occupied with the mission at hand. Other doctors arrived quickly to lend a hand, of course, as well as clergy, police and the entire Woolwich community, who had congregated on the shore, most waiting for a scrap of news of loved ones. The sorrow on each face was palpable.
I was reminded of something Effie used to say. How drastically life can change in the span of a single moment.
At Rosherville Gardens at Gravesend - the very gardens which my uncle, aunt and I had talked about visiting that fine, sunny day until a glitch in Uncle’s schedule prevented it - the news had cast a black pall over the area. The music and dancing stopped... for some, forever.
We had few details at that point. We knew that a steamboat, the Princess Alice, a 252-ton Paddle Steamer and one of the most popular of the excursion pleasure crafts on the Thames, left Gravesend at about six o’clock in the evening and was within sight of the Royal Arsenal, Woolwich, by eight. She was filled with some seven hundred merry day-trippers, many of them children
