The Countess Misbehaves

“Of course, I would care. Stop scaring me.”

“Okay,” he said as he agilely turned and jumped down onto the deck. He stood facing her. “Were you really afraid? Did you think you might lose me?”

His safety now ensured, Madeleine felt her anger quickly returning. She was furious that he had frightened her. And annoyed that he knew that she was frightened.

“Mr. de Chevalier, you might consider joining the children down in their play lounge. Your childish stunts clearly reveal that you have the intellect of a backward ten-year-old.”

Four

Later that morning, Lady Madeleine was alone at the ship’s railing, gazing expectantly out over the churning blue waters. A couple of hours had passed since she had spotted the ancient lighthouse rising majestically from the very last island of the Florida Keys. She had experienced a great rush of excitement when the huge ship had rounded that final spit of land and headed northward into the Gulf of Mexico. Now the Keys had been left far behind and no land was visible.

The winds, she suddenly realized, had risen dramatically since she’d first come out on deck that morning. She now had to cling tenaciously to the railing to keep her balance. And she noted that the waves had grown much higher, so high they were actually lifting and tossing the heavy vessel. Her breath caught when, all at once, deep swells rose beneath the huge craft and it swung and rolled violently.

Madeleine became curious, and increasingly anxious, when the ship’s crewmen began rushing about, hurrying to obey shouted commands from the stern-faced first officer. There was a sudden burst of activity as passengers hurried onto the decks. She heard a gentleman shouting to his companion as they passed that a West Indian cyclone was upon them.

Alarmed, Madeleine started toward her stateroom when the ship took a frenzied swing. As she struggled against the rising winds, she overheard two crewman speaking softly. One claimed the ship was taking on water.

Seconds later, the captain appeared on the promenade deck. Calm, collected, he walked briskly among the passengers speaking quietly, yet with clarity. “Passengers should return to their state-rooms,” he instructed. “No need to rush, no reason to panic,” he said, although he was more worried than anyone would ever know. Not only were there not enough lifeboats, they were painfully short of life preservers. And the waterproof integrity of those pitiful few vests on board was in doubt. “Return to your staterooms and secure the portholes,” he repeated again and again. On encountering her, the captain said reassuringly, “Merely a safety precaution, Lady Madeleine.”

She smiled and nodded, but she knew better. A full-fledged hurricane was racing toward them.

Struggling against the worsening winds and dodging scrambling passengers as they fled to their cabins, Madeleine finally reached the door of her stateroom. She banged on the solid wood and Lucinda yanked the door open and anxiously drew her mistress inside.

There the two women huddled together in growing fear as the S. S. Starlight pitched and rolled in the punishing winds as if it were a child’s toy. The roar was deafening as mountainous seas and fearsome gales assaulted the mighty vessel.

While the fierce storm raged, sending the huge ship into fits of savage rocking and lurching, the Starlight’s crew and many of the male passengers—including Armand de Chevalier with his suit jacket cast aside and his shirtsleeves rolled up—toiled tirelessly at three bucket brigades to reduce the flooding in the engine room.

Soaked to the skin, striving to stay on their feet, the contingent labored manfully to keep five hundred tons of boilers and engines afloat in the angry, storm-tossed Gulf of Mexico. But it was a losing battle. Soon it became evident. The S. S. Starlight was irreparably breached. The huge ocean liner was going down.

The ship now badly listing, a terrified Lady Madeleine and Lucinda rushed back outside. Terror-stricken passengers ran about on the slippery, slanting decks shouting, “Where are we to go? What are we to do?”

Families hugged their loved ones to them and herded them toward the ship’s railing where lifeboats were being deployed. Frightened people were pushing and shoving, fighting to gain a coveted spot in one of the lifeboats.

“Hurry!” shouted Lucinda to Madeleine, “we must hurry!”

The servant clung to her mistress’s hand and pulled her along through the pressing crush of humanity. But when Lucinda realized that most of the lifeboats, filled to capacity, had already dropped into the sea, she panicked. Survival her only instinct, she dropped Madeleine’s hand and elbowed her way through the mob, desperate to flee the sinking ship and a drowning death in the ocean’s depths.

Lucinda made it to the railing, climbed over, and jumped down into an overflowing lifeboat as it was being lowered down the ship’s tilting side.

The countess, struggling against the ferocious winds and screaming passengers, anxiously followed. Fighting her way toward the lowering lifeboat, badly hampered by her heavy hoop skirts, she was struck by a giant wave and flung violently against the railing and momentarily stunned.

If not for the strong hands that reached out and caught her, she would have been washed overboard.

“My God!” shouted Armand de Chevalier, “why have you waited this long? We must get you into a lifeboat at once!”

Madeleine’s head snapped around and she stared up at him in shocked surprise. She would have supposed that this self-absorbed Creole would have shoved women and children out his way to get to a lifeboat and save his own hide.

“Why have you waited?” she shouted against the wind.

Ignoring the question, Armand firmly propelled her through the hysterical crowd to the railing. Armand looked over the ship’s side and saw the last of the lifeboats splash down into the boiling sea.

Against Madeleine’s left ear he shouted, “We have to make it to the other side of the ship. There may still be lifeboats off the port that have not yet been deployed!”

The pair fought their way up across the badly listing deck, falling once, slipping back downward toward starboard. But Armand managed to rise again and pull Madeleine up. Holding on to anything they could find to steady themselves, the pair fought on.

It was far from easy.

The howling winds kept ballooning Madeleine’s skirts, threatening to lift her off her feet. Quickly assessing the situation, Armand propelled her to a deck chair that was bolted to the deck. While she held tightly to the chair’s back, Armand took a small, sharp-bladed knife from a leather holster at his ankle. He lifted Madeleine’s damp dress and slashed the threads that held her fashionable crinoline petticoats. In seconds the heavy crinoline frame fell away and Armand lifted her out of it. Free of the impeding contraption, it was easier for Madeleine to keep up with him.

After what seemed an eternity, the embattled pair finally reached the ship’s rising port side. Gripping the wet wooden railing, Armand drew Madeleine in front of him, enclosing her in his arms as he clutched the rail. His eyes watering from the wind and salt spray of the sea, he anxiously peered over the ship’s side in search of a lifeboat.

There were none.

All the lifeboats had cast off and were rapidly rowing away from the doomed ship.

“God in heaven!” Armand swore in frustration. “There are no more lifeboats!”

“I know,” Madeleine said, exhaling resignedly as she pushed a soaked lock of hair off her cheek and gazed wistfully after the departing boats.

For a long uncertain moment the couple stood there together on the badly listing deck of the sinking vessel. The winds roared relentlessly and the huge waves rose to awesome heights, badly buffeting the crippled ship. Dozens of people, washed overboard, clung to wreckage. Others bobbed about like corks in the roiling sea, supported by life belts. And above the din, the terrible screams of people filled the air as they flailed about and drowned.

Madeleine trembled and a sob of fear escaped her lips.

“Come,” Armand shouted, “let’s get in out of the wind.”

His arm firmly around her, Armand guided the frightened Madeleine back across the slick deck and up the tilting bridge to the captain’s cabin, just off the wheelhouse. Sheltering her against his tall body, Armand tried the door. It was jammed. He pressed a muscular shoulder against it, pushed with all his strength and it flew open.

Quickly he handed Madeleine inside and followed, closing the door behind him. The cabin was deserted. The captain was gone. The crew was gone. They had either been swept overboard or had fled cowardly in one of the lifeboats.

Madeleine stood in the center of the small, tidy cabin, hugging herself. Chilled with fear, she thanked Armand with her eyes when he took a large white towel from a sea chest and handed it to her.

She blotted her wet shiny face, then began rubbing her thick, soaked hair. She watched as Armand took another towel, peeled off his drenched white shirt and dried his dark chest and wide shoulders.

“I’m sorry there are no dry clothes here for you to…” he began.

Swearing, he tore a clean gray blanket from a narrow bunk that hung from the far bulkhead by strong link chains. He wrapped the blanket around her trembling shoulders and suggested she sit down. She looked around, realizing the bed was the only place to sit. Madeleine shook her head and said she’d rather stand. The words had hardly passed her lips before a giant wave crashed against the cabin, sending her sprawling on the sharply canted deck.

Armand reached her in an instant, drawing her to her feet. “Are you all right?” he shouted, clasping her upper arms.

“Yes,” she shouted back, “but maybe I had better sit down.”

He guided her to the bunk and she sank down onto the mattress’s edge. Armand drew down the bunk’s canvas restraining straps and cinched them around her waist. “That should hold you,” he said. Then he exhaled heavily and sat down on the bed beside her, realizing there was nothing more to be done.

The ship continued to pitch and roll and plunge and rise as the hurricane-force winds slammed mercilessly into the crippled vessel. Strapped down in the captain’s bunk beside a virtual stranger, Lady Madeleine Cavendish tried very hard to be brave. She had been reared to keep a stiff upper lip in moments of crisis and to never let others know she was upset.

But she had never faced anything like this. It was impossible to hide the fact that she was terrified.

“We are going to die, aren’t we, Mr. de Chevalier?” the shivering Madeleine asked, her eyes round with fear.