The Midnight Watch by David Dyer Page B

him the Rule of Three, beginning with Caesar’s Veni, vidi, vici , which he used in varying forms whenever he could. His mother, a hard little stone of a woman who beat her husband with pebbly fists whenever he drank too much, claimed Ernie was destined for better things than the Sheffield forges, and helped him with his studies as best she could. But she died when he was eleven years old and he left school to earn what money he could. As an adolescent he worked for a glassblower, stoking the furnaces and cleaning away the ash. One day he picked up a flask that he thought had cooled but which in fact was white-hot. His skin sizzled and came away. When his hand finally heeled it was disfigured with unsightly lumps and scars, and never again could he fully open it.
    When his father died Ernie moved to Liverpool and got work in the engine rooms of ships. He was a trimmer and then a fireman, shovelling coal into boilers to keep up the steam. He was quick with his devil’s claw and slice-bar to rid the fires of ash and clinkers, and he had the hottest, cleanest burn of any fireman. By the time he signed on to the Californian he was ready for promotion. He was twenty-seven years old, newly engaged to a girl in Liverpool, and tired of shovelling coal. When, on his third voyage, he was made assistant donkeyman he put on a clean boilersuit to work closely with the gentlemanly engineers and had nothing more to do with coal.
    His new position, and the whiteness of his overalls, gave him a sense that, in his own humble way at least, he had become something of a leader of men. Which was why, early in the afternoon following the sinking of the Titanic , he called a special meeting in the focsle. He had seen something very strange during the night, he said, and something needed to be done about it.
    The focsle was a private place: it could not be seen from the bridge, and anyone approaching from the ’tween decks could be heard in advance opening and closing bulkhead doors. Gill sat on an upturned crate in an area between the forward stores and the men’s bunks, where half-casks and cotton-filled sacks lay about. The men drifted in one by one: the ordinary seamen and able-bodied seamen, the trimmers and firemen, the carpenter and the bosun’s mate. They talked among themselves rather than to Gill, but he didn’t care. They would listen to him soon enough. His news would shock them all.
    He sat tracing the lumps and scars of his right hand with the little finger of his left. The men spoke of the seals they had seen lazing on the iceberg, of the terrible news delivered by the Carpathia ’s flags, of the futile search for bodies. Some said these must have been drawn down by the suction, others said they had been swept away by currents. Every sailor had become an expert, but they didn’t know what he knew.
    ‘We are a ship of shame,’ he said when everyone was there, and looked around to see if his words had taken hold. They hadn’t. The men continued their talk as if they had not heard him, so he stood up and stepped onto his upturned crate. ‘We are a ship of shame,’ he said again. ‘We saw her rockets and did not go.’
    The men looked at him and fell silent. One word had cut through.
    ‘Rockets?’ asked a trimmer.
    ‘Rockets,’ Gill repeated. ‘Distress rockets.’
    ‘Claptrap,’ said a seaman.
    ‘It’s true. I saw them myself. I went on deck for a smoke after my watch, and that’s when I saw them. The second officer couldn’t help but see them too. And I know he did see them because the apprentice told Sparks that he did, and Sparks told me.’
    The men stared at him.
    ‘The skipper was called but he didn’t come up. He just lay there and grumped and chewed the second out about it. And that’s why I’ve called this meeting. It isn’t right that a man should refuse a ship that calls for help. It isn’t right, and something ought to be done about it.’
    Gill watched the men closely. Coughin’ Kenny spluttered