The Explorer's Apprentice

75: Witnessing Death

Charlotte Mason

Panic has struck steerage like a fast-spreading plague.  At first there’s just a bit of walking about, voices whispering about what on earth is happening, a few people running up the stairs in fear.  Most brush it off.  The chaos really starts with a knock, and an employee hastily shoving life vests in the passengers’ arms.  The sheer look of panic in his eyes is enough to strike alarm.  The unsinkable ship is very much sinking, and it seems to be doing so quickly.

                        Charlotte listens to water rush into the room, watches the deep, nearly gray, blue rise ever so slowly, from her top bunk.  An eerie smile plays on her lips as she stares at the water adoringly.  She doesn’t watch for long, but it’s long enough for her to know that the end is coming soon.  She’ll be relieved of this world by a force that she can’t stop.  It’s all she wants, and it seems as if she’ll get her wish soon.  She’ll even be in the sea, the space she always thought of as the freest place on the planet.  Free from the bonds of her father, of her past, of her regrets, free from anything that ever held her.

                        Charlotte is the only one who isn’t running about panicking.  She remains in her bunk, eyes closed, attempting to picture a happy place.  In her happy place, she dances on a beach of bright white sand.  She recalls seeing it somewhere, and she can almost feel the hot sand beneath her toes when she focuses correctly.  The warm, salty air is vivid in her mind, nothing like the freezing water rushing in around her.  She wears a bright pink, sequenced dress, and she’s a much younger self than she is now.  It’s not quite a memory, it couldn’t possibly be one, but it’s the best experience her mind has.  Perhaps a distant dream, or a scene from a book she read, she’s not sure.  She just knows that with the sea salt spraying on her face, her dress twirling around her, the way the sand sticks to her wet toes, and how her hair is flying free around her, it’s the best experience in the world.  The sound of a little boy, with hair as white as snow, laughing, only makes the scene better.  She’s truly content.  That’s all she wants in her dying moment.

                        Her dreams are broken by a sharp voice, screeching in her ear.  “Are you insane?” the voice says, full of panic and frustration.  “You’re going to die!  Get up!  We need more people, you are a young girl, and perhaps you can be saved!”

                        “Sorry,” Charlotte says, still not opening her eyes.  The scene with the young Charlotte is still there, dancing before her eyelids.  Faded, but present none the less.  “But I want to die.”

                        The woman seizes her arm and Charlotte’s shocked by how cold her hand is.  It’s enough to make her eyes fly open.  The image of the smiling girl disappears, and Charlotte’s immediately in a foul mood.  “What?” she snaps at the young woman.  Her heart shaped face, flushed cheeks, and wide hazel eyes make her look desperate, as if she needs Charlotte to get up, though Charlotte’s certain she’s never seen the woman before in her life.

Is it too much to ask to be alone in her dying moments?  Charlotte thinks angrily.  She’ll sink to the bottom of the ocean with the wreck in peace.  Perhaps she’ll be famous, the girl who stayed behind with the captain as the greatest ship in history sank.

                        She was just a poor prostitute, she can imagine a historian saying.  Nothing significant.  Perhaps she knew that in her dying moments.  She didn’t even leave her bed.  She sunk with the wreck, and everything else that’s at the bottom of the ocean, like the Heart of the Ocean.