FALLING STARS

1 September 1939

On the second leg of our journey, while we are still some 1,575 nautical miles from Port of New York, the commander’s daughter succumbed to her illness. Viscountess Agnetha Fallon is nary past nine or ten, and sickened from a bout of leukemia, the attending doctor tells me. Chief informed the ship’s security crew at last port of call that the viscountess is bound for the States with her younger brother to a cure-for-cancer hospital in the Ozarks. Commander Fallon and the rest of his household elect to remain locked down near Cardiff and in the cross hairs of Germany’s advancing front lines. Even at his rank, I hear that Fallon encountered a fair amount of difficulty securing safe passage for his children.

The girl’s seven-year-old brother, Claudius, has an air of gumption I’ve not before witnessed in a boy so young. At Port of Southampton, the commander passed a note on the sly to our chief security officer, one instructing us he was satisfied leaving the dying girl in the lad’s charge. The boy is exceedingly brave, it seems . . . though quite ill himself. I would find out a half hour or so hence that he too, is on passage to the Ozarks in hopes of remission.

The ship’s naval surgeon got me on the horn at 16:43, to come to Female Isolation Ward on the double. From his clipped orders I knew he was belaying protocol as a favor, that he also had received instructions from Fallon. Instead of reporting his problem directly to the staff captain or chief of security he’d called me, one of four deputy security officers—and clearly a stroll down the chain of command in deference to nobility.

By that time, I’d had a chance to review the passenger manifest, catching on that Commander Jules Fallon was indeed one of the Welsh royals. He’d superseded his title of marquess as a military officer in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces and retired his post some years past. Like several other commanding officers of the Crown, however, he’d most recently re-upped to active duty. Fallon and his wife had traveled abroad the spring prior on RMS Queen Mary, a trip likely for laying eyes on the medical facility where their children were destined for treatment. I didn’t have the honor of meeting the commander then, for during those weeks I was furloughed in the States, helping Pops tan leather at our shoe factory in Hoboken.

As can happen with discovering a fly in the ointment, we already had several various and sundry issues brewing by the third day. Bridge received a telegram at sunrise that Hitler’s troops had invaded Poland. The Germans had 57 stealth U-boats cruising these waters, and we’d already diverted course 100 miles south of our normal route, a tactical maneuver intended to navigate us out of torpedo range. The ship was running at capacity, transporting her largest number of passengers ever; what turned out to be the final peacetime voyage of the grand lady since she first set sail in 1936. With a full schedule in store plus the added weight of 2,552 fares, one stowaway, and several million in gold bullion, Cap’n had ordered the bridge crew to cruise at a cautious pace. While Our Lady had already set a Blue Riband record for crossing the Atlantic in four days at a top speed of 32 knots, Command was clearly driven by a different set of urgencies besides those of us now hunkered in sick ward.

I retired LCDR from U.S. Navy on 3 December 1937 and began my employ on the British ocean liner sixteen months after her maiden voyage, due in part to my parents’ separation. Mum, London-born and U.S. naturalized in 1900, spent much of her life straddling two continents, lending more time lately in Nagy-Britannia per her own mother’s failing health. Pops, tethered to the family enterprise in the States, seemed willing to pony up for the whatnots and watch her come and go. My only sibling and older sister, Clara, expressed little interest in perpetuating the shoe business and married a wealthy attorney in California instead. I therefore divided my days off between both countries, and occasionally drove down to West Tennessee to visit a former shipmate. With war looming, however, Londoners were evacuating quicker than you can say Jack Robinson. By the skin of my teeth, I’d managed to book Mum and Nonna in Stateroom B450.

This was to be my last civilian stretch on the seventy-second voyage of RMS Queen Mary, having departed Southampton 30 August 1939 on schedule, set to dock in New York Harbor 4 September. I’d grown fond of the lady in the two years I’d sailed with her. England’s ostentatious best, she dwarfed RMS Titanic by some 200 feet, with twice the tonnage. Her innards were bedecked with fifty-six varieties of highly polished veneer—the real McCoy—named for British protectorates who attended her coronation. Elaborate marquetry, carvings, and murals filled every ballroom, stateroom, and salon. Classic, but functional—with wood, glass, marble, metal, enamel, and linoleum in all the right places. She was earning her status as the world’s ultimate ship, one of the most powerful ever built, just as the war in Europe escalated.

In the day, she set the bar for ocean liner luxury—frequently chartered by celebrities, dignitaries, and the very wealthy. We were hosting Mr. and Mrs. Bob Hope on this last peacetime trip, with Deputy Busby assigned to the ballroom in First Class to keep detail on the party. Deputy Stratton was rotated off-duty, and Deputy Meacham, in charge of the bullion. I, on the other hand, was making my way portside B toward Isolation Ward to collect a passenger.

As I rounded the ship’s bulkhead, I immediately saw the doctor’s predicament—his patient was no longer alive. They had yet to move the girl’s body from bunk to cold storage because her little brother’s arms were pinned across her waist, his face buried in the folds of her dress. I hadn’t caught on yet why she was here instead of Infirmary amidships, but I would soon find out. Doc and I have a standing arrangement.

Dr. Dewey Langston, a lean and wiry Brit out of Norfolk, has premature greying ginger buzzed to the scalp and spends much of his downtime on the squash-racquets court. He volleys through his daily maritime routine in much the same manner, like a squirrel running a telephone wire. Thinking a stouter torso would give me an advantage, I once made the mistake of taking him on, and since, have had a more comfortable arrangement catching up with him over a weekly pitcher at Pig & Whistle.

Langston left the difficulty with the nurse and met me at the doorway in three quick strides. “Let’s chat out here,” he muttered.

I stepped to it after Langston, who headed portside, by rope storage.

Langston can be a nervous Nellie when it comes to job proficiency, and he undoubtedly believed he was in a pickle. My first assignment: to calm him down. He fished out a cigarette and leaned against the bulkhead.

“Smoke?” He tilted the pack toward me, its paperboard quivering.

I shook my head. “Obliged.”

He lit his cig, took a long drag, and bridged his forehead with his toking hand. “Feck me, what a cockup,” he muttered. Another drag.

“How’s that?”

He shrugged with exasperation. “I bodged it.” Glanced back at the ward. “Poor sod, in there blubbing his eyes out. I thought I could give him a little more privacy with her up here.”

As opposed to the dispensary below on D Deck amidships, where she would certainly be, had she survived.

Langston checked his watch. “Dear God, it’s been three hours already. We’ll a fair bit of a pong in there shortly if I don’t get cracking.”

My take on the whole shebang up to this point was, Langston rarely bodged anything. Occupying Isolation Ward in such a manner (its quarters generally reserved for confining infectious diseases and stowaways) was quick thinking on his part. He’d managed to temporarily relocate our female stowaway too.

One sidelong glance at my vacant mug told him I’d been occupied elsewise; I’d missed the main event. Security crew was spread thin over the imperial floating city on this trip, and tensions were high after receiving reports that Hitler had not just mobilized troops, but Luftwaffe and U-boats at Westerplatte. Nonna was waging her own war with dropsy, and Mum, a touch of housemaid’s knee; I’d been to their stateroom twice today already.

I wondered if Langston knew anything yet. “Germany invaded the northern coast of Poland,” I said.

Langston’s eyes widened; he dropped his gasper. “You’re fibbing me.”

I looked down at the smoldering stub, suddenly the least of my worries. “Before dawn.”

“Bloody Jerries,” Langston muttered as he fetched his cigarette off the hull and put it out. “And where have I been? Well, here, I suppose.” Langston lit up another and launched into an abridged version of the past twenty-four hours.

“Ah, well.” He sighed. “We’re in a wrench either way. So, here’s it—we admitted her viscountess yesterday at fifteen hundred—fever, dyspnea, sick as a parrot.” His shoulders sagged. “Said she’d been head down the loo since they boarded.”

“I see.”

“Gave her scopolamine, three hours’ fluids, and pulled her off at twenty-twenty, temp normal, good skin turgor, no cyanosis.”

My best guess, a reassuring medical summary. More importantly, Langston needed to talk this one out; I’d rarely seen him this tuckered. I knew better than to dodge in with questions. “All right,” I said.

“She took a late dinner, and I discharged her to bed rest in her stateroom.”

“Okay.”

“Nurse Eddy, first shift—mentioned she saw the two of ‘em taking a cuppa on the promenade at oh-nine-hundred. Not a parka or cap between ‘em, mind you. Legging it around the sun deck.”

I swallowed, catching on. “All’s wet with the bed rest.”

“Hells to yes, and then they alert one of the crew she’s feeling a bit ropey, and she goes into cardiac arrest, right then and there.”

“On deck?”

“Outer deck, in front of God and the rest.” He shook his head. “How did he think they would manage all alone? No carer, no mum.”

I could only counter that Fallon, for reasons lost on us, had arranged their passage this way, without the supervision of any traveling attendant. Strange, but true.

Langston wasn’t appeased in the least. “I know, I know—he pigeoned a letter my way as well—but I’m telling you, mate, I’m buggered.” He grimaced. “Now I have to ring him up, and say what, exactly?”

“You reviewed their medicals?” I recalled the boy clutching two thick folders, one under each arm, at checkpoint.

“That I did,” Langston replied. “Somewise, I didn’t sort her out completely, though. They’ve both got it, and it’s rare. We’ve no setup to deal with such as that.” He groaned. “Gor blimey, what if I lose the lad too? These are nobs, mate. Mark my word, I’ll get my cards for this.”

However true it may be that croakers aren’t good advertisement—I wasn’t convinced Langston was in the jam he thought he was in. This ocean liner would soon be commissioned for war and wouldn’t be transporting any more civilians for a while. Langston and I were highly likely to re-up, so I seriously doubted anyone would sack him now.

Langston’s real problem was getting last dibs on an irreversible complication. The two medical ledgers alone were proof in the pudding that a number of experts in Europe had already tried everything.

Better that I keep my trap shut, though. Langston needed to rehash a while more.

He continued reviewing his own shoddy performance and took another drag. The girl could’ve used a transfusion before sail, he surmised; she’d presented with at least four of the classic symptoms of deteriorating childhood leukemia. Listless, underweight, and nodular were among them. The only sign of irreversibility came too late, bruising that appeared postmortem. That, he concluded, was the riddle ex post facto: her skin was girlishly smooth and completely unblemished just hours before death—and it shouldn’t have been.

“Should’ve presented with shiners from stem to stern,” he muttered. Even her gums had been free of blisters, he told me.

No longer, though. My initial glance inside the medical suite hadn’t just confirmed for me that the child was dead. When I returned to the doorway a second time, I realized I’d also inadvertently memorized the bruising patterns on her face and forearms, speculating at first sight how the girl might’ve fallen to her death.

The viscountess was an attractive child, skin milky and devoid of pigment, dark hair piled in braids on her head. Her Bonnie Jean Empire-waisted frock was selling like hotcakes in New York, its bright red and white polka dots and nautical collar all part of the latest style. I knew this because shoe factory trade follows fashion exchange between continents. I wasn’t at all surprised she wore one; Fallon would want his children to blend into middle-class America as soon as possible. Claudius, too, was dressed in short tweed trousers and a sailor-style shirt straight out of Montgomery Ward.

Hearing Langston’s recap of his shift, it was plain to me I’d been summoned for two reasons: to help him clear out sick bay, and to convince young Claudius Fallon to survive.

“You’ve a way with the ankle-biters, Gaye,” Langston has said more than once over off-duty hooch. The lowdown shipwide about me was the same. I’d had my heart broken during boot camp and sworn off women, but not kids. Langston, on the other hand, was married to his work and satisfied with an occasional fling. I guess it’s in the cards for me to meet Claudius Fallon. And if I can win the boy’s trust, I just might be able to keep him alive.

This turned out to be my assignment, my mission—for the next three weeks. Within sixty days Langston and I would reenlist to active duty and later aboard the lady who earned her reputation as the Grey Ghost, the transport vehicle for U.S. Allied Forces in the next world war.

I hammered out a deal with Langston in the hallway that evening because he was my only true chum, and we trusted each other. If he didn’t give my methods the high hat, I told him, I’d take care of the kid.

And Langston shook on it before I got the chance to beg off. “I need her in cold storage until we can sort all this out,” he added. Which meant transporting her body to the ship’s Ice Room two levels below—for our grand lady had no morgue. In the day, vaults were regarded as wasted space, and naval surgeons were usually far more opinionated about cause of death. A supply row of coffins stood permanently at the ready in H Deck Forward, near the cofferdam.

To date we’d only had one civilian death on record, and not on Langston’s watch. Protocol in such an event was simple by standard, and determining a patient’s demise without an autopsy, commonly accepted. Surgeons like Langston would simply fill out the necessary paperwork, embalm the body, and place it inside a coffin.

If a crew member died en route, we performed the customary burial at sea. A sailor would be sewn up in his own hammock, the last stitch made through the nose to ensure that he was indeed no longer with us. The ship’s linen service also provided three yards of canvas per crewman for these purposes.

Langston was still in a wrangle over this little girl’s demise, however—so all of that had just flown out the window.

I hesitated at the doorway, reminding myself that the Spartan, but pristine isolation ward with three bunks dressed in white sheets tucked tight enough to bounce quarters and the two wall lavatories stationed in between was, albeit temporarily, Claudius Fallon’s asylum.

As I entered the room, I could hear the boy whispering. I stopped and listened. It wasn’t English.

In manus tuas, Domine . . .

Shit, I thought. That sounds like Latin.

In vita sive mors . . .

“You get what he’s saying?” I whispered to Langston.

“Bits and bobs,” Langston replied. “My first-year Latin’s pretty dim—super, subter, vomito. Something about her hands, I think.” He shrugged.

The boy raised his head, regarded his sister’s gray face, and collapsed onto her belly again, sobbing. “Oh, Anya—”

I stopped a few paces behind him. Heavens to Betsy, cat’s got my tongue on just how to do this. Seconds clicked by. I’d never thought about losing my own sister, a ne’re-do-well for shoe mill toil or staying put in her own hometown, now the successful baby-factory wife of a five-figures Beverly Hills attorney. We saw them once a year at Christmas, and while I didn’t concur with some of her choices, I missed her sorely in between.

“Viscount Fallon.” My voice boomed off the walls despite my effort to address him gently. The attending nurse took a step back.

Claudius turned, snot and tears dribbling over his lips, pitch-black eyes on me. His red-rimmed eyelids and sunken, lusterless cheeks soundlessly screeched at all of us. A head of long black curls, wild ones, looked like they hadn’t been combed in days.

I took a knee and removed my cap. “Lieutenant Commander Carleton Gaye at your service.” I lowered my focus to the bright green linoleum floor in front of me.

When I looked up again, something in the boy’s gaze caught me at eye level, like looking into the strength and resilience of a feral animal. He never broke his spellbinding observation of me and, for an indeterminable amount of time, I noticed only oppressive silence save the drone of the starboard outer propeller six levels below. Neither did he turn back to his sister then, but slouched against the berth instead, expelling a long and shuddering gasp. I could’ve sworn his breath fogged the air between us; I felt its chill clap against my cheeks.

Then he raised his head slightly, and made what appeared to be a faint, involuntary chitter by clacking his molars together rapidly six or seven times. I have no children of my own, so this behavior was curious to me, plus a boy his age having cut a full set of adult teeth already, with extra-long canines.

Pops once had a big orange tom that lived at the factory to rout out leather-loving rats. I’d observed this cat doing something similar from time to time, when birds flew close enough to the windows. Whether he chittered from anticipation or frustration, I don’t know. Deeply rooted behavior and primal hunting instinct made him practice the way to kill his prey quickly and efficiently. The old tom prepared himself for his dinner with a dress rehearsal of the same jaw movements required to sever birds’ spinal columns. His chitters were no different, in fact, than the cries of his prey—audible twitters and peeps he used, perhaps, to lure them closer. The boy’s by comparison were soundless.

Strange as it may be and all, I decided to let that be that. Claudius was no doubt in shock.

“We need to move her viscountess someplace more private,” I began. Cold storage was located on D Deck, a straight shoot past the grocery store and food storage, next to the Ales and Stout. “You can come with her, by all means.”

For a split second, Langston looked like he was about to shit a brick. I cut my eyes his way as a warning, and he managed to keep his nerve. I was working by my method on my time, however harebrained that might seem.

Without uttering a word, Claudius pulled a folded scrap of paper from the waistband of his britches and held it out to me.

“For me?” I asked the boy.

He nodded. I took it.

On closer examination, this was a letter addressed to me somehow—one sealed with red wax and the Fallon Family Crest—with orders specific and parlous enough to make my hair stand on end. How the hell?

It read:

Dear Officer Gaye,

By now you are likely midway to the States, and aware that Claudius cannot be allowed to return. I have taken the liberty of posting a sum of seventeen hundred U.S. dollars to your family’s factory in Hoboken in exchange for your help. Your transport is stowed on F -Deck Forward, and in it you will find a Fisk Case for Agnetha’s burial. The lad must report to Baker Hospital in Eureka Springs at once. I trust you will drive him there. He has further instructions for his sister’s interment Stateside, as she also cannot return at this time to Cardiff.

It seems war is upon us once more. If we survive it, I will send for the lad in due time. Would you so kindly visit him whenever you are nearby? I fear that he will recover only to live alone in this world. I shall remain forever in your debt.

Cordially,
Commander Jules Fallon

I lost count of the times I reviewed the letter before I looked up at Claudius again—he, still staring a hole right through me. After tucking the note inside my uniform’s breast pocket, I made a rough calculation about what I should say next. Perhaps simply the truth was best.

“Viscount, I have your father’s orders to transport you and your sister to Baker Hospital after we dock. I understand he has made special arrangements for you on F Deck Forward.” I took a breath. “It is my duty to take you both to F Deck immediately.”

To be continued . . .