Maiden Voyage

THIRTY-NINE

Edgar came to see her in her stateroom after dinner. Dr. Fields had given her a sedative and ordered her to rest for the remainder of the evening. She hadn't told Dr Fields what had really happened, only that she had felt faint after drinking a large gin-and-bitters, and collapsed. Whether Dr. Fields had believed her or not, she couldn't tell. He had sat at her bedside in his grandfatherly coat and gates-ajar collar, looking at her shrewdly, for almost a minute, not saying a word. Then, when he was leaving, he had said, "If there is anything else you need—or anything else you wish to tell me—don't hesitate to call. I shall drop by later tonight and see how you feel."

She had slept, fitfully and nervously, for about an hour. Edgar had been in twice to see her when she was asleep and stood at the foot of the bed with Alice beside him, an unreadable expression on his face.

The truth was, Edgar was now seriously worried. George Welterman had gone much too far, damn him. He had behaved, characteristically, as if the whole world and everyone in it had been provided for his own private profit and amusement. Only Myrtle Greensleeves had escaped him, by contracting muscular dystrophy, and George had never been able to forgive her for that. But he had gone much too far by assaulting Catriona Keys, and the consequences for Keys Shipping and for Edgar's own future could be catastrophic.

Although Edgar would never have admitted it to anyone, it also cut painfully deep that George Welterman had soiled the only heterosexual erotic fantasy that Edgar had ever harboured.

Edgar had watched Catriona grow from pretty adolescence into remarkable young womanhood. He had always considered her to be somebody special in his life; not because he had ever believed that he could have her, nor that he and she could ever be suited, but simply because she was lively and young and modern, and because she was one of the most attractive girls he had ever known. Edgar had thought to himself, with wry acceptance, that if a man who has devoted himself year after year to hard and ambitious toil on the engineering side of a large shipping line, and to the insistent demands of the pocket watch in his vest pocket, and honouring his friends—if a man like that can't have just one secret dream, one blurred and arousing illusion of the boss's twenty-one-year-old daughter—well, then, why had God ever granted us the gift of imagination?

He had known all along that Catriona was at risk from George Welterman; but he had never believed that George would be so boorish and crass actually to attack her. From now on, the whole complicated bluff and double-bluff that Edgar was trying to juggle on board the Arcadia was going to be far more difficult to bring off. And if he didn't bring it off, Keys would collapse into bankruptcy and scandal, and Edgar would probably end up in prison, or worse.

He said to Catriona quietly, taking her hand, "I'm sorry."

She looked at him from underneath drugged eyelids. "Sorry? What for?"

"For what happened. For you. For George."

She gave him a half-smile. "It's too late now, isn't it, for saying sorry."

"Yes," he said. He glanced up at Alice, who was standing guard only a few feet away, on the other side of the bed. "Yes, I suppose it is."

Alice insisted, "You won't upset her, will you, Mr. Deacon? Dr. Fields said she had to stay quiet."

Edgar gave Alice a grimace that was supposed to have been an understanding grin. "You mustn't blame George too severely," he told Catriona, even though the words were dog's dirt in his mouth. "He's had a difficult life, when it comes to women. He's had to put up with all kinds of pressures. I suppose sometimes they just have to burst out."

"Poor George," said Catriona in a trembling voice.

"Well, not poor George,' said Edgar hurriedly. 'But misguided George. Reckless George. Maybe even stupid George."

Catriona said, "You're going to lock him up, aren't you?"

Edgar stared at her for a moment or two, with that bland Edwardian E.M. Forster face, then breathed in deeply through both nostrils and looked up towards the ceiling.

"You're going to do something?" asked Catriona. "He attacked me. I thought he was going to murder me."

"He wouldn't have done that. George is—well, he's bottled-up sometimes. Arrogant. He loses his temper. But not—well, he's not homicidal. He wouldn't hurt you. Not really."

Catriona stared at him, her sheets drawn across her breasts like Sheridan's Tilburina, stark mad in white satin. "How can you say that?" she quavered at him. "He raped me, and almost choked me to death. You're making it sound as if he did nothing more than—God—mildly insult me or something. Mr. Deacon, he raped me!"

She sat upright in her bed, her face white with outrage and shock. Edgar lowered his eyes in desperate embarrassment. Until now, Edgar had always seemed to her to be bossy and punctilious, determined to keep her in her place; but she had always thought that he would protect her. She had always thought that if she were threatened or cornered or pursued by some intolerable wolf, that he would immediately step in.

Instead, Edgar seemed to have delivered her to George Welterman, unsuspecting and unprotected; and now that she had suffered the humiliating consequences of George Welterman's twisted ideas about love and passion, he didn't even appear to care. She started to cry, large silent tears, not so much because of what George Welterman had done to her, but because she suddenly felt deserted by someone she had believed to be on her side.

Edgar had been an extension somehow of her father's masculine protection. Her father had charged him with taking care of her. But now that Edgar had failed in his charge, the last vestige of her father's care and influence had vanished, and she felt a sense of loss that was sharper than any she had ever felt before.

"Sir Peregrine will support me," she said. "Sir Peregrine will have him locked up."

Edgar shook his head. "Sir Peregrine is an employee, Catriona. He has to do what he's told."

"It is Miss Keys to you," Catriona reminded him, as acidly as she could.

Edgar drew up a chair, and sat down beside the bed. "Listen, Miss Keys," he said quietly, "I feel as angry and as bitter about what George Welterman did as you do. I feel responsible, too. I should never have let you go to see him without a chaperone. But, well... you didn't, and the result was that George went berserk. He's hard and disciplined when it comes to business, don't y'know, but he has this feeling that everybody and everything rightfully belongs to him, and that they're his for the taking. He's like a Roman emperor, Nero or Caligula."

"But you're going to do nothing?" asked Catriona. "You're going to let him get away with raping your wonderful Queen of the Atlantic? Do you really think that little of me? That it doesn't matter if some brutish lunatic beats me around and does the worst thing to me that any man can do to any woman? Doesn't it matter?"

Edgar unsteadily wiped his mouth with his hand. "There are two important considerations here, Miss Keys. But I'll tell you what. If you think them over carefully, and at the end of the day you still want to have George Welterman locked up, then, very well, I'll have him locked up. I'll have a police escort waiting for him in New York, and I'll have him formally charged with assault and rape."

Catriona said, "What considerations? What could be more important than my personal choice not to give myself to George Welterman?"

Edgar said, "The first consideration is Keys Shipping. The success of doing any sort of a deal with IMM depends very much on George Welterman personally. Few of the other influential directors at White Star are as interested in acquiring the Keys fleet as he is. And, of course, if we make a complaint against him, and have him arrested... Well, it troubles me, what he's done. It troubles me deeply. But I think this is one of those occasions when we must think of the poor men and women at home who are depending on us so much."

"What's the second consideration?"

"The second consideration is you. Your reputation, your family's reputation, and the reputation of your company. The fact of the matter is that you went to George Welterman's cabin alone, without a chaperone, and many judges and juries would interpret that as a sexual invitation."

"You're not serious."

"Oh, I'm serious. And they'd think that, even before George Welterman's lawyers started suggesting that you behaved towards him in a provocative fashion, and that you deliberately enticed him. George would make sure that his case was heard in front of the kind of country-bumpkin jury who love to be scandalised by vamps and flappers and petting parties. They'd hold up all those newspaper headlines calling you the Flapper of the Seas. They'd bring in evidence to show that you'd been living in sin with an actor. They'd produce photographs of your flimsiest dresses, and witnesses who would say that you were flirting with every man on board. Didn't Mark Beeney give you a necklace? What for? they would ask. For nothing? Or are you in the habit of giving your favours to wealthy men in return for jewellery and furs and champagne? You wouldn't stand a chance."

Catriona rested back on her pillows. She looked at Alice, but Alice was staring glumly at nothing at all. In a throaty voice Catriona said, "You've worked it all out, then?"

"I'm just telling you what to expect if you press charges."

"What I mean is, you've worked it all out from the very beginning. You've made me appear to be a certain type of girl, solely for the purpose of wooing George Welterman. George Welterman adores girls like me. They remind him of Myrtle Greensleeves. I should have realised how much when he brought up her name that very first time at dinner. "I was in love once," he said, and all the time he was looking at me. I was bait, wasn't I, Edgar? I was the poor unsuspecting innocent, and you were my pimp."

She pronounced the word "pimp" with such distaste that Edgar involuntarily sat back, shocked. He blurted, "You can believe me, him Keys, if only I'd suspected for one moment, I'd have—"

Catriona turned her head away. "It's too late now, isn't it, for excuses? It's even too late for revenge, if a jury's going to think that I'm a cheap sheba, whether George raped me or not. I think you'd just better get out of here."

"Miss Keys, believe me—"

"I believe you," said Catriona, and the painful part about it was that she did. "Now, leave me alone."

Edgar stood up. Alice said to him quietly, "It's best if you do, sir. She's not herself at the moment."

Edgar, with uncoordinated movements, pushed back his chair and left the stateroom. On the way out, he passed Trimmer, who said nothing to him at all and, when Edgar attempted a brief smile of greeting, found an invisible speck on one of the glasses he was polishing and devoted all of his attention to that.