Book Oracle - Chapter One

Book selection made easy for book groups and readers.

Oracle: A person who delivers authoritative, wise, or highly regarded and influential answers.

Chapter One

LEO DEPARTS

Southhampton, England, 1912

Leo uttered a deep sigh, the sigh of a man whose relief knows no bounds. He held in his hand a ticket to New York on the maiden voyage of the Titanic. He had been contemplating the move for a long time. It was finally precipitated by the Rothschilds' disastrous shooting party, from which he emerged the proverbial skunk.

After he returned to University he couldn't seem to keep his mind off his frustrations. Not bad enough that his own father didn't appreciate him and preferred his half brother, and that he was fighting the urge to commit incest night and day, but now the indication that he never would be accepted by the establishment had goaded him to quit his native land.

In Britain any chance of success was based not on what you knew or what you could do but strictly on social position. The trick was to have money without being seen to make it, a clever ploy of the aristocrats to demoralize energetic up-and-comers. And he was fed up with it. How could he ever gain his father's approval unless he had a fighting chance to prove himself?

When Clive, his roommate, got back to school a few days after the shooting party, he had assured Leo that none of the Rothschild family—not Clive himself nor his Uncle nor his father was in agreement with the Duke of Bedford's stand on sportsmanship. "Old-fashioned," Clive called it. Everyone knew that personal rivalries were rife among the shooters in certain houses. Common practice in those houses was to keep track of how many birds each shooter had taken. Even if you practiced strict rules of sportsmanship, there was no reason to humiliate a guest like Leo, who doesn't know that the local rules forbid it. Sportsmanship can be carried too far.

Clive reported that Leo's drive and energy had impressed his father, Lord Rothschild, and his Uncle Leopold. They offered him a job as summer beekeeper at Tring. For two long vacations the job worked out like water running downhill. He had an opportunity to experiment with the influence of genetics in the various strains and populations of honeybees and to earn enough money to support his expenses on the trip to the New World.

When Leo finally had his engineering degree in hand, Lord Rothschild, as Chairman of the War Board, arranged a commission for Leo to go to Canada to run a coke plant for the Algoma Steel Corporation in Sault Ste Marie, Ontario. The company booked his passage to New York on the Titanic but hadn't managed to get him a first class ticket because "they all had been snapped up by rich Americans."

At his farewell dinner in Beckenham, Leo promised his mother he would return frequently. "Soon they will be flying the Atlantic faster than Bleriot flew the channel." He told them. "The world will shrink, you'll see."

His father seemed bewildered by Leo's departure. It never occurred to him that he had any part to play in the decision. If Adam had shown the slightest interest in Leo's well- being, perhaps Leo could have been persuaded to give it a try in Britain. At the moment his father and his father's favorite son, Egbert, were wrapped up in the pending National Insurance Bill, and could think of nothing else. Leo listened to their droning on about it like two bumblebees in a bottle. Egg objected to the bill because of its employee contributory requirement for both the sickness and unemployment benefits. Even if it passed, he predicted strikes and unrest.

With their pacifist leanings, both Egg and Adam had trouble approving of Leo's involvement in the war effort. They associated the making of steel with armaments. The idea of his managing a coke plant affected them like an explosion of virulent cells.

Leo had hoped that his whole family would journey to Southhampton to cheer him off on the Titanic, but he saw that it was the farthest thing from their minds.

Chloe, who had taken his clapperclaw sister, Fawn, under her wing lately, suggested that the three of them take the milk train down from Waterloo Station to Southhampton. They might breakfast at the famous South Western Hotel where the rich and famous stopped overnight before their ocean voyages.

All the night of March 9, the three of them were jammed into a banquette for two in the crowded carriage. Leo was conscious of Chloe's body next to his and her scent in his nostrils. He wore his blue blazer and blue crew socks, as though out for a Sunday stroll, and felt thoroughly uncomfortable in a carriage packed with working class blokes from the East End. After rattling along in the dark through Woking, Winchester, and Eastleigh.

They arrived in time to catch seamen in flat wool caps and baggy trousers loading aboard famous dogs of famous people. Attracted by the yapping of the overwrought dogs, two seamen staggered out of Grape lounged dockside along the rail, snickering about the passenger list including monikers like Sun Yat-sen, Publisher Henry Harper's prize Pekinese; Fifi, Robert W. Daniel's championship French bulldog; and Kitty, John Jacob Astor's prize Airedale.

Leo and his sisters stood at the dockside rail with their mouths open, staring at the spectacle of what appeared to be an entire city brilliantly illuminated against the black sky. As dawn gradually crept in, they edged along the dock toward the hotel. A crowd of relatives of voyagers, well-wishers, and the curious gathered.

Leo had seen the ship in Belfast before it was completed, wrapped in a monstrous iron enclosure eleven stories high and four city blocks long. Aware that the ship was over eight hundred feet long, until this moment he had no conception of how enormous it would appear in dock. The impression heightened when the rudder came into view, looming over them as big as an oak tree. A melange of unidentifiable sounds emanated from the ship.

Shortly after sunrise the first class train from Waterloo chugged up the tracks on West Road. At the same moment a burly man in a white apron flung open the doors of the South Western Hotel Restaurant. Leo and the girls slipped in front of the stream of train passengers making a beeline for the restaurant.

The headwaiter quickly seated them at a small table near the window. Leo settled into the velvet Louis XV armchair and gazed across at Chloe. Now that he was on the verge of parting from her, perhaps forever, he allowed himself to fully drink in her beauty. Chloe was so different from the rest of the family with her golden hair and violet eyes that he had trouble holding it in his mind that she was his half-sister. Good job he was leaving, he thought, as his body responded to his wandering thoughts.

He concentrated on a long table that displayed hams, galantines, tongues, cold grouse, pheasant, and partridge. In the corner square tables held fruits, jugs of water, and hot and cold lemonade or pots of tea and coffee. One table had a huge tureen of porridge and all the attendant utensils plus several sorts of sugar and a variety of jams.

"Does one serve oneself?" asked Fawn.

"I presume so. You could ask the waiter when he returns."

"I see both going on," said Chloe. "That couple in the corner is being served by the waiter, whilst several others are helping themselves."

The waiter returned with tea and toast. Fawn ordered pheasant and assorted stewed fruits. ]

"That couple in the corner, is Sir Cosmo Duff Gordon and Lady Duff Gordon," said Leo. "I imagine they are accustomed to being served. I also hear they managed to get a first class ticket."

"I should think so," said Fawn.

‘I hear that these upper crust passengers paid as much for their second class tickets as first class tickets cost on other liners. The way the ship is designed it's deuced hard for the classes to mingle."

"I read that there's a locked steel door between first and second class, and an impenetrable barrier between the third class and the rest." Chloe said.

"I shouldn't be surprised. That's British Society to a zed." Leo buttered his toast. The ship's supposed to be unsinkable—built throughout of steel with a cellular double bottom. All the decks are steel plated. "

"How do you know all this, Leo?" asked Fawn.

"I watched it being built in dry-dock. Then the company sent me a packet of information and included a diagram of the ship, Thank God. Otherwise I'd never find my way around the place. It's a bloody maze."

"Otherwise you'd be stuck in second class the whole trip. Will you actually be able to find your way from one section to another?" asked Chloe.

"I think so. I shall certainly try. I look forward to meeting Americans."

The time neared when Leo would board. The Titanic was scheduled to leave for Cherbourg at noon. From the window he could see the third class train from Waterloo puffing up to unload its steerage passengers like cattle, onto a special runway from the White Star Dock.

He longed to hold Chloe in his arms for a moment before they separated. He thought of sending Fawn on some false errand, but was afraid she'd get lost in the crush now building on the platform outside. He was proud of Chloe for taking on Fawn. She could be a handful. He certainly didn't want to undermine her efforts to save Fawn from her own follies. The little devil was not above trying to sneak aboard, if separated from them for any length of time.

They stopped on the way out to pick up Leo's bag from the cloakroom.

"Is that all you're taking?" asked Chloe.

"Travel Tip #1: take as little as possible."

Aside from a week's clothing, he had packed nothing but a photograph of Chloe in an antique silver frame and several of his father's books. At the last minute his mother had tucked in his valise a small, well-worn Bible. His engineering texts were being packed and shipped by the company directly to Canada. He had read in the Times that rich Americans take on board hundreds of boxes and trunks.

The crush on the platform made it impossible to determine which was the proper gangplank to mount. Leo patted his blazer pocket to check on his ticket and passport. Even with his height, it was almost impossible for Leo to see over the heads of the frantically waving spectators.

As he watched, he spotted a stream of top hats floating along above the heads of the crowd. It struck Leo that this was a good way to identify the boarding pattern. Normally, toppers would signal the first class entrance. On the Titanic it meant the second class entrance. The distance from the platform along the riverfront up to the promenade deck looked sixty feet.

The toppers disappeared into the ship at B Deck aft of the center of the ship, accompanied by enormous flowered and birded hats settled precariously on the heads of fashionably dressed women, many with parasols, and some with small yapping dogs tucked under their arms. Below on D Deck, a queue of bowlers rose up from ground level and bobbed along, entering the ship at approximately the same place.

When the steerage passengers unloaded from the Waterloo Train earlier, Leo had observed that many were hatless, or wearing the flat wool caps of the working man. He craned his neck around to the gangplank going into Deck E at the bow of the boat, and sure enough hatless passengers were streaming up the plank into what must be the third class entrance. He looked about for some straw boaters. He was wearing a smart tartan cap, for he imagined that neither a straw boater nor a top hat would be appropriate in a coke plant in Canada and he couldn't see wearing a bowler aboard ship. But by the looks of the number of Americans flowing into D Deck through the first class entrance, bowlers were the vogue. The men all seemed to be wearing three piece lounge suits with the jackets buttoned high, narrow trousers and bowler hats, the women full-skirted suits with long jackets and enormous hats.

Where was Second Class? Just follow the toppers. Leo began moving along the rail toward the stern of the ship, firmly grasping the elbows of his sisters as he went.

"No bands playing? No streamers and confetti?" Fawn shouted in his ear over the din of the crowd and the whistling of steam escaping."

Just then the ship gave off an enormous blast. Some of the spectators started waving boaters in the air. Leo hurried along, watching uneasily as huge nets of steamer trunks swung over their heads into the hold of the ship.

About a third of the way from the ship's stern he spotted the second class gangway queued up with a mixture of headgear, including top hats, and any number of straw boaters. If the Americans had actually got all the first class cabins, these must be the English, but he couldn't see other upper drawer types like the Duff Gordons not managing to wangle first class staterooms. Ismay, the steamship manager, who was taking the maiden voyage, would be in first class. And what about all those illustrious Brits he heard had been rerouted from the Acadia?

The Phillips moved along the rail with the queue until it reached the bottom of the second class ramp to board ship. It was the moment he had been dreading—parting from Chloe. Fawn hung on Leo. He kissed her on each cheek and gave her a brief hug.

He turned to face Chloe. She looked more beautiful than ever through the misty film covering his eyes. He took her in his arms and pressing her to him, whispered in her ear, "Or leave a kiss but in the cup." She leaned away and without hesitation finished the line, "And I'll not look for wine."

Fawn's sly, habitually bored visage took on a knowing expression. "Time to let go, you're holding up the queue," she said, then, "Keep your pecker up, Leo."

Leo glanced up the gangway and saw that it was more than half-empty. He waved his cap at the girls and bolted up the ramp to the top, which turned out to be at a standstill. What on the earth was the snag? He gazed down at the dirty water below and concentrated on two small tugs maneuvering around the gigantic ship.

In the end he couldn't keep himself from seeking Chloe out from the gesticulating crowd below. He was astonished to see her waving a small paper bag and calling out to him. What with the escaping steam, the whistles blowing, the crowd screaming farewells, and the general confusion, he couldn't make out what she was saying. Then it dawned on him, and he burst into laughter. She was no doubt shouting, "Hey old dear, you forgot your gin."—a private joke between them.

Click to read Chapter Two.