“Taken the helm of what?”

“It’s okay, sir. I guess you could call me a seaman.”

“Good. I’m shorthanded here. Get in and take the stem.”

Jonathan took Edith’s arm and guided her toward the lifeboat. She submitted, and he stepped in after her, taking his place next to the rudder right behind the two Hoffman boys, whose family name was not really Hoffman. Their father had kidnapped them from their mother in France, hoping to raise them in America under an assumed name. Before putting them in the boat the man kissed them both farewell and then whispered a message to Michel, the older of the boys: “When you see your mother, you tell her exactly what I am about to tell you.”

Jonathan knew that Michel’s mother would eventually die in a mental institution, and that eighty years later Michel would tell a researcher, “I still remember every word of what Father said, and it will go to the grave with me.”

Jonathan could not hear what the father had whispered. It was not in the program, remaining for him one of Titanic’s unsolved mysteries. He could only wonder, as Michel looked down and pointed excitedly to a line of portholes still glowing under the cold green Atlantic.

“Pretty,” Michel announced as the lifeboat reached the water. But when Jonathan looked where the child was pointing, a shudder ran through him (My Jesus! Did I write that?) as he saw that two or three meters below the surface, in a cabin that was still unflooded, a man was peering out into the ocean, straight up at the white-painted keel of number 11. Then a dull thud, more felt than heard, came from below. The man in the cabin glanced away toward the bows, then scurried aft as if he had seen something.

The crewman in charge ordered the ropes unhooked and Jonathan obeyed; and then, while Edith’s back was turned to him, he wrapped his legs around the after fall and hoisted himself back to the boat deck. Edith called for him to come back, but he waved the boat away, assured her that he would be all right, and disappeared into a crowd of onlookers.

By now the slant of the decks was becoming so steep that it was difficult to stand without holding onto a fixture or a rail. He made his way to a railing just aft of the second class library on the starboard side. Titanic’s lights had dimmed to a warm red glow, and mist was gurgling out of her from somewhere far forward, a tangible brown vapor that spread with lazy speed and cast a glare of backscattered light upon her decks. The masts and deckhouses stood out of the night as though they were on fire. Overhead, men from steerage were clambering up a cargo crane, crawling out on its boom in an attempt to reach the imagined safety of higher ground.

“Oh, yes,” Jonathan told himself. “You’ve got the scene almost perfect this time. Just like the history books.”