Free Carpathia by Matt Forbeck Page A

besides the sailors: a yachtsman named Major Peuchen and an older Arabian gentleman, named Mr Leeni, who seemed to have sneaked on board. Would they stand by and watch Hichens murder two women? Would the other women scream in horror and cower from the man's actions as much as they had from his threats?
      Lucy was about to find out.
      Hichens stood halfway up and then sat back down again, curling up against the bow on his other side. "Fine," he said, shaking his head. "Do whatever the hell you like. It's a fool's errand. It's too damned late for any of them anyhow."

 
 
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
     
 
 
    "There's no room here," one of the bedraggled crewmen already on top of the overturned lifeboat said. "Go find your own bit of flotsam."
      Quin glanced around and saw that there were precious few things to find this far out from where the Titanic had sunk. Most of the people must have been too exhausted after escaping the wreck to swim the distance required to reach the lifeboat, but Quin and Abe – who'd had a head start on most of them – had managed it. Now they'd found that their effort might have been made in vain.
      "But there's plenty of space on top of there." Abe pointed to the other end of the boat, on which Quin could see a few open stretches of whitewashed wood. "Be a good chap and give us a hand up."
      Exhausted men lay stretched out across the rest of the overturned vessel. Many of them wore the uniforms of the Titanic , while others were dressed in cheaper, unadorned clothes, the kind that indicated they'd either been working below decks or traveling in steerage. No matter their class, though, Quin hoped they were trying to catch their breath and weren't in fact already dead.
      The man who'd accosted them shook his head and brandished an oar at both Abe and Quin. "I can't make any exceptions. Stay back. Don't force me to use this."
      "No one's forcing you to do anything," Abe said, anger rising in his voice. "Least of all, trying to kill us. You swing that thing at me, and I'll make you eat it!"
      "Forget it." Quin tugged at Abe's shoulder. "There's nothing we can do about it."
      Quin tried to keep his voice resigned, but his mind had already started working on an alternate plan. He just needed Abe to play along with him for it to work.
      "Are you insane?" Abe spun about in the water and slapped Quin's hand away. "There's nothing else out here. Either we get on top of this lifeboat, or we're done for. We can't make it back there," he said, pointing at the raucous thrashing about of the hundreds of people who'd gotten free from the wreck. "Even if we did, all the decent bits to grab on to are sure to be taken. We have to make our stand here!"
      Quin had seen this same look in Abe's eyes before. The man's sense of honor and righteousness had been insulted, and he wasn't about to back down from that without a fight. In the past, Abe had called it his noblesse oblige . Quin recognized it as Abe being bullheaded.
      When faced with an insurmountable wall, Quin backed down, reassessed the situation, and found a way around it. Abe, on the other hand, beat his forehead against it until either the wall or his skull cracked. This obstinacy had landed Abe in police custody on more than one occasion, but his father's money and influence had extricated him from those situations without any further ill effects. Once Abe explained to his father why he'd refused to back down, Lord Godalming always gave his son a proud slap on the back and then sent him back out into the world to sin in exactly the same way over and over again.
      In the past, Quin had contented himself with watching Abe go through this noble pantomime of his, often to the point that he'd been willing to be arrested alongside him. In each case, Lord Godalming had extended his pull to helping Quin out of the resulting troubles too. Quin's parents, however, had not been nearly so understanding of their son's behavior.
      This