From the depths of tragedy rises a woman torn between a forgotten past, a dangerous present, and a love worth fighting for.
1. A Death on the Street – March 15, 1931
The sidewalk on 42nd wasn’t especially crowded for an early spring Sunday in New York. The well-dressed old man walked freely between passing pedestrians, jauntily swinging his cane, the cane he told everyone he needed for the war wound he had never received. He whistled a soft tune to himself, something from a bygone part of his life, a period he hated to look back on but wouldn’t leave his memories. His life was good, and he eschewed old memories. He was more than happy at what he had achieved over the years since he had become a widower, freed from his servitude.
She made my life intolerable!
He was suddenly surprised at how much vehemence the thought of her brought to his now ordered life. Anger, he told himself, was not for him. That was all in the past.
It was then, at the very instant the old man was beginning to forgive her for making him angry, that a young woman stepped out in front of him. She was wearing a nondescript dirty and threadbare blue farmer’s bib-overall, a dirty old cap and her left arm was in a sling. He noticed, looking her up and down, familiar scuffed red shoes… those familiar scuffed red shoes. He was surprised and stopped walking, amazed at the sudden familiarity of her small, sweet face. He opened his mouth to speak, maybe even daring to be impolite and ask if she was related to… but he never had the chance to speak.
The girl pulled a small pistol from the sling with her free arm and levelled it at him. Too late, he realised who she was.
“Maggie.” The words formed on her lips and she smiled, clumsily cocking, and firing the pistol, twice… three times.
The old man groaned, stumbled forward but stopped his fall with his cane, gripping it tightly with both hands. He suddenly thought of her once more, leaned forward on his cane and looked up at his assailant.
“You have her eyes,” he said to her, coughing blood that spattered the young woman’s dirty clothing. He smiled at her, lost his grip on his cane, and fell forward, hitting the sidewalk heavily.
The young woman screamed, and tears welled in her frightened eyes. Before she knew it, she was pulling back on the hammer to cock the gun again, levelling it this time to her right-temple. The gun belched loudly once more. A knot of female pedestrians, caught in the tableau of hate and death unfolding before them, screamed their hysteria as one. They watched in horror as the girl staggered left, then right and then keeled forward, dropping to the floor, but managing with a gasp to stop her face hitting the hard concrete. Her arms took the full force of the fall, but soon failed and she crumpled forward, a small sob leaving her mouth.
New York rain suddenly splattered the sidewalk, hissing across the concrete and spreading onto the pools of blood forming around both victim and assailant, the blood mixing in death where in life the family blood had become tainted and poisoned, fuelled with jealousy, hate and revenge. The old man’s eyes met the young woman’s as they lay a few feet apart. There was no hate now. No fear. A family was reunited as death took the once living into its bosom. In a final act of contrition, New York’s rain washed the blood away and the sins of a family flowed into the gutter where they belonged.
2. Magda’s Journey – April 1912
She was born Magda and her name became synonymous with early 20th Century American history. But in ways that nobody understood, Magda will be lost, and Maggie will replace her. But, for now, in this brief fraction of time that is being played out before us, we will call her by her given name, Magda.
In the here and now of her young life, Magda, with almost a girlish inquisitiveness, stole a sneak view of the mighty ship, though in reality all she could see was the side of the immense black hull through the gap between a row of buildings. She stood, looking through the window of the White Star Line’s ticket office, dockside in Southampton. The view between the rows of buildings was small, as was the view of the ship’s funnels, showing just above the same buildings.
“I’m not sure I can do this, Miss, not without proper authority.”
The girl in Magda soon dissolved and her face turned a grim shade of distaste as a small sneer crept up onto her lip. She turned and gave the ticket clerk full vent of her fury.
“I don’t care about what you think,” she shouted, the words echoing about the large but empty office.
The ticket clerk was taken aback and literally stood back at the force of the beautiful young woman’s angry outburst.
Magda didn’t wait for an answer and opened her daytime bag, retrieved her purse, opened it, and pulled out a large five-pound note. Magda slapped the money on the desk between her and the clerk. “This will pay for the changes I want,” she said in a much lower and sweeter tone.
Her anger turned to sweetness so quickly the clerk was confused, but he quickly laid his trembling hand on the large white fiver and slipped the money across the desk and into his pocket. It took a few minutes to issue new tickets, but in the end Miss Magda Asparov became Mrs Magda Turner. In just two days’ time she would be boarding the magnificent new ship on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic to New York, and this name change signified a new start to Magda. No more would she be a common peasant girl in Ukraine. Now she was a woman of substance, a woman with a place in society and a first-class cabin on the most magnificent Ocean-going liner of the day.
As Magda left the office, she breathed in the crisp sea air, ignoring the smell of oil and other unknown smells. She would soon be boarding, and the day felt superb… indeed the day felt the same as the name of the ship, Titanic.
The great day had arrived, and Magda was agog at the sheer mass of people, horses, and carts massing on the quayside. Even automobiles, unheard of where she came from in the Ukraine, a form of transport that didn’t need a horse or ox to pull it. It was something she had only heard tell of and never seen up close, a miracle of the modern world she now found herself immersed in. It was overwhelming.
Many people were forming orderly queues, awaiting their turn to embark. They were in the same situation as Magda, wide eyed and awed by the sight of the mighty ship. At the other end of the scale, and literally at the other end of the great ship, were the rich, the famous and some from Britain’s landed gentry, who were boarding with their families. Their staff and other servants embarked with the riffraff further down the quayside.
When Magda boarded, she followed a steward down the corridors to her cabin, all the time admiring the elegance of the surroundings. Placing Magda’s luggage in the room, the steward stood back, close to the open door, and coughed, once, very discreetly. “Will there be anything else, Miss?”
Magda turned and looked the steward in the eyes. “No. You may go.”
The steward looked surprised but said nothing and closed the heavy door behind him as he left.
Magda had no intention of tipping anyone, not because her funds were low, which they were, but because she saw no reason to help anyone along the way if they were doing a job they were paid for. It would be several hours before the great ship was due to set sail, so Magda took the chance to go up onto the promenade deck for a stroll. On the way up she was passed by multiple stewards carrying large cases and more trunks of clothing than Magda had ever seen. The stewards all smiled at her, not quite out of politeness, more out of lust, being young men with mostly hot Irish blood flowing through their veins.
“Can I help you, miss?”
The man’s voice was rich and had a lovely lilt to it. Magda turned to see a handsome young officer, looking concerned. “No, I’m fine, she said. Thank you.”
“I can tell by your accent you’re from the south,” he said with a beaming smile.
“South?” Magda’s brow furrowed.
“Cork, at a guess.”
Suddenly Magda realised he thought she was Irish. “No,” she said with a small laugh, “I’m from a small village in Ukraine.”
“But your accent…”
“It was my father’s wish that I should not sound like a peasant when I was taught English. This really is the first opportunity I have had to test my language skills out. I must say, I am disappointed. I thought my accent was neutral.”
The officer’s smile broadened. “I think it’s a lovely accent, Miss. Now how can I be of service?”
“Can you point me towards the promenade deck, I wish to look over this lovely liner of yours.”
“Of course,” he said, turning. “Just follow me, Miss.”
Magda did as the officer bid and trailed in his footsteps, all the while marvelling at the magnificence of the Titanic. Once the officer had led her to the promenade deck he bowed slightly, raised his hat, and bid her a safe journey. As it turned out, Magda enjoyed her walk and in the coming days would spend as much time as possible on this deck, until in the early hours of one morning, fate took a hand in Magda’s life.
3. April 14-15, 1912
Magda was content as the mighty ship ploughed forcefully through the sea and she walked gracefully along the ship’s promenade deck. It was dark and cold, but the gay music from the ballroom washed over her and Magda reflected on her soon to be new life. She smiled at a passing ship’s officer, knowing full well he, and many others, secretly desired to get to know her better. But she considered most men to be beneath her and treated them to a smile, but a smile hiding her cold contempt. Not for her the drudgery of a scullery maid in a big American household, or the wife of a lowly ship’s officer. Magda would control her life, not her parents and certainly not her husband. In her new life, she would be the mistress, the power behind the throne to such a mansion that she had never suspected she would see inside. Magda had one goal in America, to gain money and power.
At only twenty-years of age she would become the wife of a man twice her age, a man she had never met. She had of course seen him; at least, she had seen a photograph. Not at all the same thing, she readily admitted, but it was better than nothing. Yes, he was overweight and yes; he was no doubt hungry for knowledge of her body. Magda would ignore those small facts. The bigger fact was that he was rich. Rich, powerful and more than capable of being manipulated and moulded into something Magda could manage, someone she could control. In preparation she had diligently learned English, perfecting her accent so that not a trace of her own language could be detected. She was ready for this challenge, ready for anything the world could throw at her.
A steward passed by Magda and smiled at her. He was carrying blankets for a small group of passengers chatting near the stern promenade. He had seen Magda many times and often day-dreamed of talking to her, maybe even taking her out for a drink in his local pub in Southampton. But Magda never smiled back at him, staring through him as if he didn’t exist. The shudder of the great liner brought him out of his reverie, and he looked round.
Magda too was shaken from her own thoughts, and she also looked around. Suddenly realising she had walked almost the entire length of the ship and was now close to the stern, the bow to her rear. Magda turned and gasped, the cold night air blowing into her face causing her breath to form swiftly flowing clouds of water vapor. Against the backdrop of the ebony and bejewelled night sky, Magda saw something she had never seen in her life and instinctively backed away from it.
The ship shuddered once more and then lurched with shocking violence. Ice came crashing down onto the deck at the prow of the ship. Magda watched, fascinated, as the enormous iceberg crept inexorably along the side of the ship, dropping huge amounts of ice onto the luxury liner’s heaving and twisting deck as it passed by. With one last lurch, the ship veered away from the ice and Magda turned to her right to move away from the steadily falling ice.
Magda moved too slowly, her dress catching on a deck chair. The left side of Magda’s head was struck by a large piece of heavy ice, a piece of the brittle sea, the force of the blow cutting into her flesh and knocking Magda sideways to the ship’s rail and at the same time the ship lurched. As she fell, on that starry, cold, cold night in the Atlantic, blood poured from her wound and Magda Asparov fell into oblivion.
The darkness slowly gave way to a twilight world, a world that sparkled with light in a deep blue hue. She floated within a cocoon of soft grey, snuggling down into the softness, trying to fend off a deeply penetrating cold. Night came once more and once more the inky blackness took hold of her and enveloped her.
“You can’t have that, Pieter!”
Magda stamped her feet in anger and frustration as her brother threw another stick into the apple tree branches. The last remaining bright red fruit was ready to drop and would fall to the one that caught it, and Magda’s brother was better at playing catch than she was.
“Pieter!”
Her brother didn’t take his eye off the prize. “Father says you should call me Peter, for the sake of the American.”
“Hah!” Maggie snorted her derision but turned back towards the house and looked nervously at the large and expensive horse and carriage that had brought their American visitor from the city. He was here to meet the family, to ask a few questions and then he would depart, so her Father had said. But Magda wasn’t stupid, she was clever in her own way. She may have been in her late teens, but she still had the head of a wily woman. She had seen the way the American had looked at her, like a child in a sweet factory, but with pure lust in that lascivious gaze. Magda instinctively knew about men, and what men wanted. She wouldn’t give away her body to any man except for a price. Love never came into her mind when she thought about men and their desires. Magda was cool, calculating, and full of her own needs. The price for her compliance in a relationship was high, and it was too high for anyone she had so far encountered… except maybe this American. They had never met, or spoken, but even from a distance she could see the look in his eyes.
She knew her father had money problems. His business, canning fruits, and vegetables had been bought by a large company, but the price they paid had not been what her father had wanted. She knew he’d been cheated; that he was too weak and docile to act, which made her job that much easier, because she took what she wanted, always.
“Got it!”
Peter’s cry jolted Magda back into reality and she stamped her feet once more when she saw him bite into the juicy and sweet apple. “That was mine,” she screamed.
The boy looked back at her, his blond fringe flying in his face as the wind picked up. “Finders keepers,” he said, taking another bite.
Before he could say or do another thing, Magda had picked up a fallen branch and hit the apple out of her brother’s hand, then proceeded to beat him across the back and arms. Wherever she could land the blows she did, all the while admonishing him for stealing what she knew was rightfully her apple. Magda’s anger knew no bounds when she felt cheated.
The cold was beginning to bite into her. Fingers and toes were burning, becoming numb, despite the thick ship’s blankets she was wrapped in. Her dream was broken, and the memories of her past life slipped away to lay dormant in the recesses of her mind. Briefly Magda became aware of her surroundings. She saw ice as well as splintered wood from the life-raft she had fallen into when she fell overboard. The small craft had broken her fall, then it had broken free from its divots. Falling down onto a breakaway berg from the behemoth of ice that had dealt the death blow to the ship, Magda, unconscious from the blow to her head, had been unaware even as it crashed into the ice that saved her from drowning.
While hundreds around her drowned and the great ship broke in two and sank, Magda’s icy saviour twisted and turned in the great convulsions of water that saw the passing of the Titanic. Magda, in her stupor, her body reacting to the cold, huddled down into the wrecked life raft and found a saviour in the multiple blankets a hurrying steward had thrown on top of her just as the divots had broken. The steward had watched in horror as the raft fell away but was then himself hit by a mass of ice as the berg had crashed into the ship. He was the first fatality on that starry night, but his actions had saved Magda.
4. A Disaster Unfolds
The ship ploughed its way through the dark and still waters of the northern Atlantic, heedless of any danger to itself. Her captain had called for full power and her crew had obliged obediently. In the time before the dawn, all those on board who were awake knew something was amiss. A Cunard Line ship usually made her way calmly and sedately through these waters, especially this time of year where loose icebergs were a danger. But this ship was on a mission, a rescue mission, to save as many souls from certain death as was possible.
Some passengers had been woken by the noise from the ship’s engines and the crew hastening to make ready to take survivors on-board. Some were confused by the determination of the crew, and some realised something was amiss. A few, a very few, knew this could only mean a ship was sinking and needed assistance. As the dawn approached people on deck could see icebergs in the distance, some so large that were they to hit one it would doom the ship. But their captain knew his job. Despite only being in command for three months, the captain had ensured his crew were well trained and diligent, as was he himself.
On deck, crew and passengers alike felt the ship slowing and those on look-out were calling out that they had seen something in the dark water. It was a calm sea and so the lookouts had no trouble spotting the first lifeboat. The ship slowed once more and manoeuvred itself toward the lifeboat. Passengers and crew were dismayed at the sight of a lifeboat with so few people in it. It didn’t seem to make any sense. But as time went by, it was apparent that this would be the norm as more lifeboats were spotted and few were full.
The ship continued the search of the area where the Titanic had sunk. By now, all on board were awake and most were only now realising they were witnessing a disaster of epic proportions. A ship considered unsinkable, lost and a loss of life so large that all were stunned into silence. They watched as survivors, so pitifully few, were brought aboard the Carpathia.
The captain, Arthur Rostron, gave the order to head for New York, the nearest port. He also ordered his Marconi man to send out urgent messages to any ships nearby to come at once and search for survivors, though he doubted anymore survivors would be found now. Captain Rostron knew those who didn’t make it into a lifeboat and had jumped into the sea, even wearing lifejackets, were most likely dead due to the extreme cold. His crew had managed to find four dead victims, and he ordered a burial at sea.
Rostron’s Marconi man reported several ships were on their way. Some had changed course, and some were coming from the nearest ports. By the time these ships arrived, Rostron felt certain there would be little hope of finding anyone alive.
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The sequel to The Brittle Sea is Book 2 of the trilogy, The Brittle Land
The Brittle Land
The sequel to The Brittle Landis Book 3 of the trilogy, The Brittle Sky
The Brittle Sky
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