She continued: ‘Jack gave his life jacket to a lady who did not have one, then he leapt into the water to be with me, even though he is not a strong swimmer. He is a good man and right now he is alive, but unless I get him onto your boat within the next few minutes he will perish. You must help me. Someone – anyone – give me a hand.’
It seemed to take ages but it must only have been a few seconds later when she felt her fingers enclosed in a man’s grip.
‘Give me yer man’s arm,’ he said, his accent rough. Someone else helped, and they dragged Jack on board with difficulty then reached down to haul her up, scraping her bare legs on the side. Her shoes and stockings had long since floated off.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered, moved beyond measure. ‘God bless you.’
She removed the bulky life jacket and threw it overboard then huddled up with Jack in a space in the stern. She wrapped her body around him, cradling his head next to her own, breathing her warm breath across his face, rubbing his back and his arms. She could feel his heart still beating; there was a weak pulse in his neck, a tiny twitch, but his eyes were closed and his breathing shallow.
Seabirds squawked above but otherwise it was quiet. No one on the lifeboat spoke, all of them lost in a trance of shock and cold. Gerda couldn’t bear to look out at the debris in the water, at the bodies of all the folk who hadn’t made it. She concentrated on trying to transmit the warmth from her blood into Jack’s core. Her fingers and toes throbbed and her throat hurt but she knew she would survive. Please, God, let Jack make it. On board the ship she had worried that he was the strong one, he was the clever one, and she’d feared he would realise she wasn’t such a good catch. But it turned out she wasn’t useless after all. Please God. Please.
She had no sense of time – how long she had been in the water, how long in the boat – but the sun had begun to lower in the skies when they heard the unmistakable sound of a ship’s horn. Gerda raised her head and looked over the edge to see a fishing boat approaching fast. Sailors were waving at them.
She bent and kissed Jack full on the mouth, whispered in his ear: ‘We’ve made it, dear. We’re safe.’
His eyelids flickered and his lips moved. She bent her head close to his mouth.
‘Tell me again. I didn’t hear.’
‘I love you, Snow Maiden,’ he murmured.
This is a fictionalised account of a real-life couple, Gerda Nielsen and Jack Welsh, who met on the ship and were married on Thursday 13th May, 1915, just six days after the sinking, in a Manchester registry office. Of the 1,959 passengers and crew on board the Lusitania, only 761 survived.
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Gill Paul is a full-time write of both fiction and non-fiction. Her novels include Women and Children First, about a steward on the Titanic, and The Affair, which takes place in Rome in 1962 on the Cleopatra set as Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor fall in love. Her new novel, No Place for a Lady, set amongst the chaos and carnage of the Crimean War, will come out in July 2015.
CLAUDIA CARROLL
Single, Forty and Fabulous The Feel-Good One
Avon
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2015
Copyright © Claudia Carroll 2015
Claudia Carroll asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © February 2015 ISBN: 9780008136109
Version: 2015–01–23
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