Across from the wireless shack, on the Boat Deck, Lifeboat No. 8 hung suspended from its iron davit. Like each of the Titanic’s sixteen wooden lifeboats, No. 8 was built to carry sixty-five passengers and measured thirty feet long, nine feet wide, and four feet deep. It was a simple, sleek, and graceful structure that tapered to a point at the stern and at the bow and was fashioned from overlapping planks of white-painted yellow pine held by copper nails. The white interior had four wide seats made of pitch pine, as well as foot-wide planks for additional seating that ran the length of the boat on both sides. Beneath the seats were stowed three sets of heavy oars and a kerosene lamp.
Every ship is supposed to have a lifeboat drill, but there had been none aboard the Titanic. Most passengers did not even know where their life belts were kept. The Countess and her cousin Gladys had to ask a steward to find theirs. “I’m sure it’s unnecessary,” he said, “to put them on.”
“No,” the Countess replied firmly, “we’ve been ordered to do so.”
The steward fetched the life belts from atop the suite’s exquisite wardrobe. Then the Countess and Gladys dressed in woolen suits. Gladys topped hers with a seal wrap; the Countess put on a full-length ermine coat, placed her small brandy flask in one pocket, and fastened around her swanlike neck a strand of three-hundred-year-old pearls, a precious heirloom that she had worn at dinner just a few hours earlier. Her other jewelry, fine pieces configured from pearls and diamonds, remained in their satinwood box.
As the two women left the suite, Gladys picked up a miniature photograph of her mother. How silly, she thought. We shall soon be back here. She placed the miniature on the dressing table and walked out the cabin door.
On the way to the deck, they passed the assistant purser, Ernest Brown. He tipped his hat as they went swiftly by. “It is quite all right,” he told them, “don’t hurry!”
What a lovely night, the Countess thought as she walked out onto the Boat Deck. She stood near Colonel John Jacob Astor and his wife, Madeleine, a sweet-faced eighteen-year-old who was one year younger than her husband’s son. Lavished with riches by her doting forty-seven-year-old husband, Mrs. Astor was attired in a diamond necklace and a black broadtail coat with a sable lining, as if dressed for afternoon tea at the Ritz.
John Jacob Astor was the wealthiest traveler on board and one of America’s richest men. At a time when the upper class took a dim view of divorce, he had committed the dual sin of shedding his first wife and wedding a teenager. Their recent marriage had met with such disparaging gossip among New York society that they had decided to winter abroad. But now Mrs. Astor was pregnant; they wanted their child to be born in America, so they were heading home, accompanied by his valet, her maid, a nurse, and their Airedale, Kitty.
The Countess was impressed by Mrs. Astor’s calm, but then every first-class passenger was calm, for they all believed they would soon be told to go back to bed, and that the order to wear life belts and stand on deck was nothing more than a precaution issued by a seasoned captain known to err on the side of safety.
And so they chatted among themselves, contented, self-assured travelers returning from sojourns to Egypt or Paris, or from wintering in Baden-Baden or Cap Martin, unaware that these were the last hours of their lives or, if they proved to be among the lucky ones, the last in which they would ever be absolutely certain of anything.