Read Chapter 29: A City's Cold Welcome

The boarding house walls were thin enough to hear the landlady’s radio through the plaster, and every night at nine it played the same mournful tune. Élodie had come to hate it. She sat at the narrow table by the window, a cup of cold tea before her, the torn locket open in her palm. Rose and Louis stared up at her from the creased photograph, their faces smudged at the edges from seawater.

From the bed, Tom shifted. He had been asleep for most of the afternoon, his breath shallow but steady. The fever had broken four days ago, the doctor said, but the wound in his side still wept through its bandages. He refused the hospital. Refused to be a charity case, he said. What he meant was that he refused to be separated from her.

“You’re staring at that thing again,” he said, his voice hoarse from disuse.

Élodie closed her palm around the locket. “I was thinking.”

“You’ve been thinking for three weeks.” He pushed himself up onto one elbow, wincing. His shirt hung open, the bandage a white gash against his pale skin. “What did the letter say?”

She had not told him. She had read it three times that morning, then folded it into her pocket, where it had grown damp from her sweating hands. Now she pulled it out and laid it flat on the table.

“It’s from the White Star office,” she said. “They’ve closed the file on the children. Officially declared them lost at sea.”

Tom was silent for a long moment. Then he swung his legs over the edge of the bed, his bare feet meeting the cold floor with a soft thud. He crossed to the table and sat across from her, his eyes moving over the letter’s small print.

“That’s not proof,” he said. “That’s paperwork.”

“I know.”

“Then why are you crying?”

Élodie touched her cheek. She had not realized she was. “Three weeks. The trail has gone cold. The witness said a well-dressed woman took them at first light—but no one else saw her. No one else remembers. The officer’s records list everyone from our lifeboat as lost, including us, if you can believe it. We are ghosts, Tom. We are dead people trying to find children who may not exist.”

“They exist.” He reached across the table and closed his fingers over the locket. “You found this. You found them once. You’ll find them again.”

She looked at his hand—the way it trembled slightly, the way his knuckles were still bruised from the fall. He had been so brave in the water. Brave and foolish and bleeding, and she had nearly lost him.

“I have no money,” she said. “No references. I can’t even book passage on a ferry to Staten Island without counting coins.”

“Then we count coins.”

A knock at the door made them both freeze. The landlady never knocked. She simply shouted through the wall. Élodie rose, her heart quickening, and pressed her eye to the peephole. A man in a long gray coat stood in the hallway, a hat in his hands. He was unfamiliar. Middle-aged, soft-featured, with the weathered look of someone who had spent years at sea but had since gone soft.

“Miss Marchand?” he called through the door. “I’m told you’re looking for information. About the children.”

Élodie opened the door a crack. Behind her, she heard Tom rise and move quietly—not to the door, but to the corner where he’d hidden the knife he’d bought off a dockhand in Hoboken.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“My name is Silas Beck. I was a steward on the Carpathia.” He lowered his voice. “I helped an Englishwoman and two children off the ship before we docked in New York. Before the manifest was taken.”

The room seemed to tilt. Élodie gripped the doorframe. “Englishwoman?”

“Lady Winifred’s lady’s maid.” He glanced down the hall. “The lady herself survived too, miss. But she didn’t want to be found. Changed her name. Moved to Brooklyn.”

Élodie’s breath caught. Lady Winifred—the woman who had treated her with such cold distance on the ship, who had taken charge of the children when Élodie had been swept away in the chaos of the sinking. She had assumed the woman was dead. The officer had said so. The records had said so.

“The children,” Élodie whispered. “Are they with her?”

Silas Beck’s face tightened. He looked at his hat. “No, miss. The children got separated from the lady during the rescue. They were taken ashore by another passenger. A stranger.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know her name. She paid off a dock inspector to skip the registration. I only know she lives in Brooklyn. And I know she’s not the only one looking for those children.”

Tom stepped forward, the knife hidden behind his leg. “Who else?”

Silas Beck’s eyes flicked to Tom, measuring the threat. “The husband’s family. Lord Tarrant’s people. They’ve got men in the city asking questions. Offering money for information. They don’t want the children found by a French schoolteacher who’ll raise them in a tenement. They want them back in England, under their control.”

Élodie’s stomach turned. “The husband is dead.”

“The family isn’t.”

The words hung in the air. Silas Beck shifted his weight. “I came to tell you because the steward’s girl—the one who helped me—she told me about you. Said you dove into the water after a man who had no business surviving. Said you carried a child through freezing water around a burning funnel.” He shook his head. “I’ve seen a lot in my years at sea. But that kind of love—it’s not something you walk away from.”

Élodie’s throat tightened. “You said she lives in Brooklyn. The stranger with the children. Do you know the street?”

“I know the house. It’s green, with a black door. Down near the Navy Yard. But tracking her down won’t be easy. She’s gone quiet since the bounty hunters started sniffing around.” He reached into his coat and pulled out a folded piece of paper. “That’s the address. And the name she’s going by. You’d better hurry, miss. The husband’s men are not patient.”

Élodie took the paper. Her fingers were shaking.

“Why are you helping us?” Tom asked. His voice was flat, untrusting.

Silas Beck looked at him a long moment. “Because I was there, sir. I heard the screaming in the water. I helped pull bodies into the lifeboat until I couldn’t feel my arms. Those children are alive. That’s a miracle. And I’d rather put my faith in a woman who dove into the Atlantic than a family that pays men to find children with gunpowder and rope.”

He tipped his hat and turned down the hall. Élodie watched him go until the stairwell swallowed him. Then she closed the door and leaned her forehead against the wood.

Tom came to her. He didn’t touch her, but she felt his warmth at her back. “Brooklyn,” he said. “That’s not far.”

“We have no money for the ferry.”

“We’ll walk.”

She turned. He looked terrible—pale, bruised, his side a mess of bandages. But his eyes were clear.

“You can barely stand,” she said.

“I can walk,” he said. “I’ll walk until I can’t, and then you’ll drag me. It’s what we do, isn’t it?”

She let out a breath that was half laugh, half sob. She unfolded the paper. The writing was cramped and hurried but legible: *Elise Brooks. 214 Sands Street. Brooklyn.*

“Lady Winifred,” she read aloud. “She’s calling herself Elise now.”

Tom took the paper from her and looked at it. “So we have two names and an address. And a pack of bounty hunters on the same trail.”

Élodie reached into her pocket and pulled out the locket. She opened it. Rose and Louis smiled up at her, unchanged, unbowed by the sea.

“Then we don’t stop,” she said. “We don’t sleep. We find them first.”

Tom folded the paper and tucked it into his pocket, over his heart. “We find them first,” he agreed.

A sound from outside made them both go still—the click of footsteps on the stairs, heavier than the landlady’s, slower than Silas Beck’s. Élodie moved to the peephole. A man in a dark suit stood on the landing, a bowler hat tucked under one arm. He was looking directly at her door, as if he knew she was watching.

He raised a hand and knocked.