Read Chapter 7: The Iceberg Threat

The wind had teeth. Élodie pulled her collar up as Tom led her along the boat deck, past coiled ropes and the silent black mouths of the lifeboats. He walked with his hands in his pockets, the way a man does when he is trying not to look where he is going.

“You said you wanted air,” he said over his shoulder. “Not conversation.”

“I said both.”

He almost smiled. “Then you’ll have to forgive the conversation. I’ve been staring at the purser’s manifest until the letters swam.” He patted his breast pocket. “Your Marie is not on it.”

Élodie stopped. “What does that mean?”

“It means she’s not listed there under her own name. Or she came aboard with a different ticket, or she is using a false one.” He turned to face her, the wind flattening his hair. “Or she is not Marie at all.”

“She is Marie,” Élodie said firmly. “She is as real as my hand.”

Tom raised both of his in surrender. “I never doubted your hand.”

She folded her arms. The cold crept through the wool of her coat, but she did not want to go inside. Inside, the walls pressed in with steward after steward, all of them ready to tell her she was mistaken, overwrought, imagining a child who was not where she said she was. On deck at least the wind agreed with her urgency.

“Then we will find her another way,” Élodie said. “We must go down to steerage again. Speak to more of the families. Someone will know a girl with red hair and a small brother named Louis.”

Tom’s brow furrowed. “After dinner, maybe. But you heard what the steward said today. If we push too hard, they’ll start to watch us. And I can’t afford to be watched.”

“You are afraid of this Calloway.”

“I am afraid of what he can take from me.” Tom’s voice was quiet, but it carried over the deck. “Rose is the only thing standing between me and ruin. If Calloway decides I am not delivering her according to his plan, he will do to me what he did to my brother. And I don’t want to think about what he might do to Rose.”

Élodie opened her mouth to answer, but a shout went up from the forward rail. She turned with the rest of the passengers—no more than a dozen of them braving the cold—and saw a man in a gray overcoat pointing out past the bow. His arm was trembling.

“Look,” he said, not loud, but with the kind of fear that carries. “Look at that.”

Élodie followed his line of sight. At first she saw nothing but the dark water, a stretch of slate-blue and steel. Then, off the port side, a shape emerged from the haze. It was white at the top, green-black below the waterline, and it rose out of the sea like a cathedral built by giants and abandoned.

It was an iceberg. And it was enormous.

Tom came to stand beside her. His breath caught. For a long moment neither of them spoke. The iceberg drifted past in eerie silence, its flanks carved into spires and hollows, a city of ice sliding slowly down the world’s edge.

“My God,” Tom whispered.

A steward in a brass-buttoned coat came striding along the deck, waving his hand dismissively. “Nothing to worry about, ladies and gentlemen. Saw this one from the bridge a quarter hour ago. She's a small one. Captain’s already plotted a course around the field.”

“That is not small,” Élodie said. She did not mean to say it aloud, but the words came out before she could stop them. The steward glanced at her, a flicker of irritation crossing his face.

“With respect, miss, I’ve seen more of these than you have.”

“Have you seen more of them, or have you simply been told they are small?”

The steward’s jaw tightened. He turned away without answering, moving on to reassure the other passengers in a louder, heartier voice. Tom watched him go, his face unreadable.

“He’s right about one thing,” Tom said slowly. “The captain knows it’s there. They’re not going to hit a berg they can see.”

“No,” Élodie agreed. “They will hit the one they cannot see.”

She said it lightly, almost to herself. But the words hung in the cold air between them, and Tom did not reply.

They walked on in silence to the aft end of the deck, where a ladder led up to the boat deck proper and, beyond it, the officers’ walk. A young officer stood outside the radio room, stamping his feet. He held a slip of paper in his gloved hand, and his face was white in the lamplight.

Tom gave Élodie a quick look and then approached him. “Something the matter, son?”

The officer blinked as if he had forgotten there were passengers about. He looked at Tom, then at the paper in his hand. “Just a telegram,” he said. “Relayed from another ship. The *Mesaba* reports heavy ice north of here. Pack ice and bergs.” He laughed, but with no humor. “They’ve been coming in all afternoon. We’re so far ahead of schedule the captain wants to get to New York early.”

“Faster?” Tom said.

“To make a headline,” the officer said, folding the paper. “They want to be talked about. Not like the *Olympic*, sitting in port with her glamour to her. They want us to be famous.”

He tucked the telegram into his coat and walked off toward the bridge, leaving them alone at the base of the ladder. The wind whistled through the rigging, and the iceberg, already fading astern, glowed faintly like a bone in the dark.

Élodie turned to Tom. The cold had seeped into her cheeks and fingertips, but inside she was burning.

“I am not waiting for dinner.”

Tom blinked. “What?”

“Louis’s mother. Marie’s mother. If this ship is pressing on through a field of ice at full speed because the captain wants to be famous, how many hours do we have? How many hours before we are in the way of one of those?” She gestured at the dark water where the iceberg had passed. “I cannot find Marie with a manifest that does not list her. I will find her with her face and her story and her hands. I will go down into steerage and speak to every Irish family on this ship until one of them recognizes her brother’s locket in your pocket or my telling of her voice.”

Tom opened his mouth, and she saw the protest forming—the risk, the steward’s suspicion, the watchful eye of Calloway’s men. But he looked at her face and closed his mouth again.

“You believe we don’t have much time,” he said. It was not a question.

“I believe the ocean is larger than any man’s schedule.”

He stood for a long moment, wind pressing his coat against his back. Then he nodded, slow and deliberate.

“Then we don’t wait. We go now. But we do it smart.” He stepped closer, lowering his voice. “Third-class passengers aren’t allowed on the boat deck, and I’ll be marked the moment I try to go below decks alone. But you—you are a woman, and you look like you are going to help someone with something. That is your passport.”

Élodie almost laughed. “I will take that as a compliment.”

“You should.” And he said it so simply that she believed him.

She glanced back at the bridge, where the white masts of the wireless antenna cut against the stars. Somewhere inside that little room, messages were arriving from other ships, other captains, other men who had seen the ice and tried to warn them. And the captain was driving them on, chasing a headline in the morning papers.

“If we do not find her before the ice finds us,” Élodie said, “I will not forgive myself.”

Tom’s hand found her arm, a brief squeeze through the wool. “Then we will find her before the ice finds us.”

He said it like a vow. Élodie nodded, and they turned together toward the companionway that led down into the body of the ship, leaving the wind and the fading iceberg behind. Behind them, unnoticed in the shadows by the radio room door, the young officer they had spoken to watched them go. He had taken out a small notepad and was writing something in it.