“The boat set out [from France] while we were eating, and we could not believe we were moving,” Juliette wrote to her father. She had thus far met only one other couple on the Titanic who could speak French, but this did not seem to matter to the children. Little Simonne had amused her mother by “playing with a young English girl who lent her [a] doll. My Simonne was having a great conversation with her, but the girl did not understand a single word.”
Nevertheless, despite the comforts of the reading room from which Juliette posted her letter—“There is a concert here, near me: one violin, two cellos, one piano”— she wrote that there did indeed appear to be something monstrous about the ship, giving her and Joseph “a slight trepidation.”
And now had come the loud bang at the door and a cry of warning. Joseph, who spoke English fluently, sought out a deck steward, an officer, or anyone else who might possess information. He came back with news that the Titanic had suffered an accident, and his instincts told him that the monster might sink. He bundled the children in warm clothing, gathered Juliette’s money and jewels, and led the family toward whatever fate awaited them near boat 10, where Second Officer Charles Lightoller would soon be working under the twin assumptions that the new lifeboats were as frail and risky as older models and could be launched only half full. To him, this meant that what little space remained in the boats was not to be occupied by adult male passengers—and especially not by passengers of the second and third classes.
Another officer in command of the same string of portside lifeboats would soon be arriving on the boat deck to become a double barrier against Joseph Laroche’s chances of survival. Fifth Officer Harold G. Lowe was a man very quick to draw his gun against nonwhites approaching the boats. He generally regarded them as dangerous and glaring, like animals.
Juliette had learned only recently, while planning for her family’s new life in Haiti, that she was pregnant with their third child, who would now have the peculiar distinction of becoming a Titanic survivor who did not appear on any passenger lists.
Ellen Phillips, like the yet-to-be-named Joseph Laroche Jr., was absent on account of not having been born yet. Her father was Henry Marshall, but his real name was Henry Morley, and he was not married to his traveling companion, “Mrs. Marshall”—who was really his nineteen-year-old shop assistant, Kate Phillips—but to another woman. From the first seconds of impact, Ellen was embarking on one of the legal world’s longest episodes of abandonment and delaying tactics. Her paternity and inheritance claims would remain unresolved from the beginning of one century into the beginning of the next. Though yet to be born, the daughter of Henry Morley was already heading into a maelstrom of broken promises, dying dreams, the emerging cruelty of a young mother on the path to insanity, the false hopes of a mad dash aboard the Titanic to a secret life in San Francisco, and a final parting gesture of devotion in the form of a blue sapphire necklace later to be called “Love of the Sea.”
Behind them, in the countryside of Worcestershire, England, the Morley family’s first confectionery and ice cream shop had been standing for more than three generations. At the time of his departure, Morley was leaving behind a business that had begun expanding into neighboring towns, and he was also leaving a twelve-year-old daughter—all for the sole purpose of spending the rest of his life with Mrs. Marshall.
Morley had sold his interest in two of the family’s shops with the help of his brother. A portion of the proceeds was traveling with him aboard the Titanic, to be used as a down payment on a new life in the western United States. The rest of the money, as arranged with Morley’s brother, would provide an income for the twelve-year-old girl he had resolved never to see again. Morley had also arranged, through his brother, for the rest of their family to believe that his trip to America—to the warmer, drier climate of California—was an attempt to find relief from what he had convincingly displayed as the potentially life-threatening health of his lungs.
Convincing people of such things was not difficult in those days. Common colds and even bruised thumbs often turned deadly, and the vow of “till death do us part” usually did not mean for very long. Stewardess Violet Jessop had lost two little brothers and her little sister to what by the last third of the twentieth century would be regarded as easily treatable infections. When Violet was a child, her parents had moved her to the mountains, based on the belief, similar to Morley’s, that drier air and regular doses of creosote (a product of oil tar) and red wine would cure her nearly fatal lung infection. Jessop’s lungs recovered, but her father died suddenly in 1903 from a simple infection, not quite having reached the age of forty.
According to plan, Morley was to board the Titanic as Henry Marshall and simply disappear.
By five past midnight, Morley and Phillips and the rest of the passengers who were awakened by Hardy and his junior stewards were filing past the second-class dining saloon and the library. Even below the decks, they could hear excess steam being vented from the pipes near the tops of the smokestacks, to prevent damage from the boilers that had been providing full-ahead power to engines that were suddenly standing idle.
Despite the alarming hiss from outside, the empty library was, in its own way, eerily silent. Fellow second-class traveler Lawrence Beesley—a schoolteacher who was headed now toward a destiny in the same lifeboat as Kate and her unborn daughter—would write later that he could look back across the years and recall every beautiful detail of the room, “with lounges, armchairs, and… writing bureaus round the walls of the room, and the [books] in glass-cased shelves flanking one side, the whole finished in mahogany relieved with white fluted wooden columns that supported the deck above.” It seemed incomprehensible to Beesley that a mindless, rudderless mass of ice should be able “to threaten, even in the smallest degree, the lives of [so many] men and women who think and plan and hope and love.”
Masabumi Hosono also passed the deserted library on his way to the boat deck. The Japanese efficiency expert who had streamlined the Manchuria Railway and the Trans-Siberian Express still had several pages of “On Board RMS Titanic” stationery folded into his coat pocket. Letters written earlier in the day and posted in a mailbox outside the library door were now bagged and already underwater in one of the bow section’s sorting rooms. The stationery was durable rag-based paper, and the inks used in 1912 were indelible.
Given the right conditions, letters written by Hosono and other passengers during the first and last voyage—or stowed away by Howard Irwin’s friend in what was to become an oxygen-starved environment—were about to enter the vault of the ages, allowing the Titanic’s people to speak clearly after a hundred years or more. In at least one case, the comparative resilience of the Titanic’s paper and ink (compared to the ship’s bulkheads) would bring understanding to a family divided and even a measure of vindication mingled with joy and profound sadness.