Don’t be a fool, she’d berate herself at night, awake beneath blankets that never warmed her through. Of course you can’t tell him, he’d never believe. But what if . . . what if.
Then came the morning when Daniel failed to meet her at a café as planned. She waited an hour, then returned to the hotel, where a letter soon arrived. In it, he apologized for misleading her. There was a woman in Jaffa, a childhood friend, the daughter of a family whose business strengthened his father’s. Not an arranged marriage, but an expected one. The language was tortured, self-castigating. Perhaps it was a failure of character, he wrote—but he could no more defy his family’s wishes than he could cut off his own arm.
Humiliated, Sophia had packed her belongings within the hour. They soon left for Nablus and the blessed train, where Sophia could sit alone in the women’s car and not have to face Abu Alim’s silent sympathy.
He would’ve rejected you anyway, once he knew, a vicious voice in her mind had whispered.
Onward they’d sped to Beirut, without itinerary or plan. Abu Alim had seen her settled at the hotel and then gone back to Homs, to return for her in a week. In the meantime she wanted no markets, no ruins, and nothing more taxing than a novel to read, something frivolous and French.
But after only three days, Sophia had grown inordinately sick of her own company, as well as the Deutscher Hof. The hotel took great delight in its Bavarian incongruity, and the Black Forest décor of mounted stag heads and Reichsflagge pennants was wearing on her nerves. On the wall beside her bed was an oil painting of Hohenzollern Castle in winter, its pale battlements rising above a mountainside bristling with snow. Looking at it made her shiver, and she wished she could take it down.
She decided to allow herself a change of scenery. She’d visit the Saint George Cathedral to view the frescoes, but nothing more enriching than that. She donned her hat and her shawls, and walked north along the high-walled street, the sea a mist-blue line in the distance. At a corner she passed a newsstand, and glanced down at a stack of papers.
Her father’s face stared back.
* * *
The R.M.S. Carpathia neared the Chelsea docks.
The city was muffled in rain and mist. Church bells rang out suddenly from the shore, the noise pulled about by the wind on the river. Likely they were meant as a gesture of respect, thought Julia Winston as she sat in the ship’s dining-room with the rest of the widows. To her they sounded like the din of a crowd, come to harry the grief-stricken. What was it like. What will you do.
Young Madeleine Astor sat nearby, her pretty face pale and drawn, her hands draped over the visible swell of her stomach. The’d put her next to Julia in Lifeboat No. 4, while Francis stood smoking a cigarette with Jack Astor and George nervously watched the crewmen fumble with the davits. At seventeen, George had been deemed too old to be sent off with the women and children—and Julia hadn’t said a word against it, hadn’t begged them to let him go with her. Too afraid to hurt the boy’s dignity, in front of his father.
There’d been room for a dozen more in the lifeboat when they’d lowered it. She should’ve screamed at the men, clawed their eyes out. Let me have him. Let me have my son.
The Carpathia nudged the dock, and the women all flinched. Looking around, Julia wondered which of them would sell their stories to the papers. She’d heard the crew murmuring that the press was inundating Cunard with telegrams, demands for interviews. They were calling the Carpathia the “Ship of Widows,” a romanticism she found utterly vile. Her thoughts returned again and again to the empty seats on the lifeboat, the sight of Francis and Astor smoking their cigarettes while George tried to mimic their calm. Here were men who ruled empires, men whose names meant power and consequence—and if these men chose to plant their feet firmly upon a sinking deck, then George would do the same. The pointlessness of it all took her breath away.
The crew gave the signal. The survivors gathered themselves and walked out onto the dock and through the pier shed, into the rain and the gathered crowd: hundreds of reporters and onlookers, a sea of pale faces, all utterly silent. She’d expected shouting, but this was worse. Flashbulbs exploded, blinding her. Someone, she had no idea who, took her by the arm and guided her to the curb, where Francis’s Oldsmobile waited. The driver seated her inside, closed the door—then seemed to hesitate, confused, before remembering that there was no luggage.
At the house, the staff waited anxiously beneath the portico, next to columns swagged with crepe. They brought her into the parlor and sat her by the fire, offered her broth and toast, hovering, clustering around her, murmuring questions: Was she warm enough? Did she want a shawl?
“Stop coddling me,” she snapped, and they backed away.
Presently she became aware of a muffled argument behind her. She caught the words unwise, her father,
