The sinking of the RMS TITANIC on the night of April 14, 1912, in the North Atlantic.
CHAPTER 12 – THE END OF THE ROAD
22:46 (Iceland Time)
Sunday, April 14, 1912 ‘A’
R.M.S. TITANIC
Middle of the North Atlantic, south of Iceland
Few of the people still up and present on the Promenade Deck paid much attention to the old but tall woman, dressed in a simple but elegant gown covered by a long fur coat, as she made her way towards the Forecastle Deck. Those who did mostly marveled at the vigor of her pace for such an obviously old lady with white hair and wrinkled face and hands. Ignoring the few stares, the old woman exited in the open air and went down on the Forward Crane Deck, then up again on the Forecastle Deck. The air was at the freezing point and made even more cold by the ship’s speed of 22.5 knots. Apparently not bothered by the cold, the old woman went to the bow, where she leaned against the railing and looked ahead of the ship into the dark night. Nancy Laplante ‘B’, traveling under her official name of Lady Jeanne Smythe-d’Orléans, then reflected on her long but fruitful life and her many accomplishments. Officially eighty years old in this life, she was in reality 191 years old now, the longevity treatment received as a member of the Time Patrol helping her look and feel like a woman closer to seventy years of age. Both of her lives, the one in the 17th Century as the Marquess of St-Laurent and the one that had started in the 19th Century as Jeanne de Brissac, then as Lady Jeanne D’Orléans, had provided many tragedies but also many satisfactions to her. As the Marquess of St-Laurent, she was already officially dead at the age of 65, having supposedly drowned during an Atlantic crossing from New England to France in 1700. She had left in Philadelphia her adopted son, James Walker, his wife Annette Beaulieu and his two sons and one daughter. Jame’s wine shop, dealing in wine imported from Nancy’s estate of the Château La Tour Carnet, near Bordeaux, was prosperous and had provided his family a comfortable living in peaceful Philadelphia, far away from the anti-Huguenot religious persecutions that had been sweeping France since 1680. The estate of La Tour Carnet was itself in the good hands of Nancy’s son from D’Artagnan, Charles. Charles had retired from the royal musketeers and had married a local girl, Jeanne Dupré, from whom he had a son, Pierre, and a daughter, Réjeanne, who in turn had given Nancy a further seven great-grandchildren, albeit after her official death. As for King Louis XIV, once a lover and good friend of Nancy, he had grown into an increasingly intolerant and egotistic tyrant, from whom Nancy had been further repelled by the often mean gossips about her circulated by the king’s confessor, who had rightly suspected her of aiding and protecting Huguenot Protestants around Bordeaux, and by the king’s other mistresses. While Nancy had been sad to leave her sons and grandchildren in France and Philadelphia, she had also felt some relief at exiting the increasingly poisonous atmosphere of the royal court in Versailles, which she had avoided as much as she could by continuing to conduct field missions for the King. As for her life as Jeanne Smythe-D’Orléans, it had been most eventful and had quieted down a bit only in the last decade. After rebelling against the Time Patrol and becoming an independent time-traveling operator in 1860, following the birth of her illegitimate twins from King Louis XIV, she had renewed her efforts to help the wounded, the sick, the poor and the downtrodden, living through the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. More work as a nurse and Red Cross representative had followed during the turbulent decades of the end of the 19th Century in Europe. She had also gone through the numerous social tremors and colonial wars of the time while continuing to expand the work of the d’Orléans Social Foundation. Her charitable organization was now supported by a hidden financial empire built along six decades and which was now worth over 300 million British Pounds Sterling. That empire was however operated in a very discreet manner and very few people knew about the true extent of Jeanne’s fortune, which she used almost exclusively to help others or further extend her reach. Her charity and nursing work had attracted her many honors, including the awarding to her of the Order of the Red Cross by Queen Victoria, but also many political enemies. Her support of the legal defense of French Army Captain Dreyfuss during his celebrated trial, followed by his imprisonment and then his retrial, had branded her as a ‘social revolutionary’ in the minds of many French politicians and military leaders. Her financial and political leverage had however been too powerful for those men to dare attack her directly. Her political and social victories had unfortunately been shadowed by the successive deaths in Paris of her father Pierre in 1894 and of her mother Suzan in 1897. Her children in the 19th Century, William, Louis and Anne, had grown to adulthood and married, forming families of their own while staying close to Jeanne. Jeanne now had a total of ten grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren in this century and knew that the future of her charity organization and financial empire was in good, dependable and trusted hands.
Coming out of her mental contemplation of her past lives, she looked at her wristwatch and saw that it was now twenty past eleven. Walking calmly away from the railing, she went back inside the ship and made her way aft to the 3rd class social hall, in the stern part of the Upper Deck. She had just arrived in the social hall when the ship shook, while a long scraping sound could be heard from the lower hull. Knowing perfectly well that this announced the collision of the TITANIC with the iceberg that would sink it, Jeanne nonetheless went to sit quietly in one corner of the mostly unoccupied room, where less than a dozen men were still playing cards in two groups. A few of the men, 3rd class passengers who had booked passage on the ship to emigrate to the United States with their families, eyed her briefly but discreetly, surprised by the visit of an old woman who was visibly of a much higher social class than them. They however didn’t comment loudly about her and continued playing cards.
After a few minutes and with still no signs or indications that the ship was in trouble apart from the fact that it had slowed down and stopped, Jeanne got up and used the nearby 3rd class main staircase to go down to the women’s lavatories. There, she relieved herself one last time and washed her hands. A young redhead woman who was combing her hair in front of the sinks counter looked at her with curiosity when she saw the six medals pinned to her dress, which had been hidden up to now by her fur coat.
“Uh, excuse me, madam, but are we suppose to celebrate something tonight?” She asked with a strong Irish accent. Jeanne shook her head gently and looked into her brown eyes, speaking softly to her.
“No, miss. There will be nothing to celebrate about tonight.”
“Then, why the medals, madam?”
“Because I wanted to look my best tonight, miss.”
On those mysterious words Jeanne left the young woman and returned to the 3rd class social hall, her fur coat over her left arm. There, she sat quietly in a corner and observed the other passengers as they gradually realized that the ship was in some sort of trouble. They understood the true seriousness of the situation only when crewmembers started running down the passageways in the 3rd Class section while shouting that the ship was sinking and that the passengers had to go up to find places in lifeboats. That quickly emptied the 3rd Class social hall, with its occupants then running to their cabins to go get their families. Now alone in the hall, Nancy calmly got up from her chair and went to the nearest set of stairs leading to the open air decks above.
From a corner of the stern deck, Nancy watched with sadness as hundreds of panicky 3rd Class passengers tried to find places in the few lifeboats available, only to be turned away by crewmembers or to see the lifeboats leave without them. Unfortunately, she couldn’t help those poor people in any significant way: this tragedy was going to be one of the most thoroughly documented disasters in history, with detailed lists of the victims and of the survivors made in the days to come. Saving any significant number of those unfortunate souls could severely impact history, with genealogical trees drastically redrawn and with the future possibly changing in unpredictable ways. The one thing that she still could do, though, was to write a final epitaph to one single life.
Climbing the stairs leading to the Boat Deck and going forward, Nancy however stayed away from the crowds still trying to board lifeboats, instead going to the entrance to the 1st class lounge on the Boat Deck. Entering the luxurious lounge, she found inside less than twenty male passengers waiting their final fate there as water was about to rush in via the forward entrance doors. Walking quickly to a man with gray hair dressed in a fine evening suit, she sat beside him at his table, drawing a stunned look from the man.
“Lady Jeanne? How come you didn’t take place in one of the lifeboats?”
Jeanne smiled to Benjamin Guggenheim, one of the richest passengers on the TITANIC, and gently pressed his left hand.
“I wanted to leave a space for someone younger who still had not seen much of life. I also wanted to die by the side of a true gentleman.”
Guggenheim swallowed hard, with tears coming to his eyes as he looked into her resolute green eyes.
“It will be a true honor to have you with me at this time, my dear Lady Jeanne.”
Just then, the forward doors of the lounge crashed open under the pressure of the sea and tons of water rushed in. Jeanne passed one arm around Benjamin Guggenheim’s shoulders as the frigid water started rushing around and over their legs.
“God is about to accept us back in his fold, Benjamin.” She said tenderly to the man, mere seconds before the water submerged them completely.