Free The Band That Played On by Steve Turner Page B

seems to me that I am unburdening myself of a huge weight because I love you very much. I have many faults perhaps but don’t think that I do not think about you often. I also believe that you are in good health and that consoles me for all the worry I’ve put you through, which I wholeheartedly regret. If the cello from the Sun Palace is no good, tell Morlais to send it to Eldorado in Nice as that’s where I had to go and it’s Morlais who has the business.
    All my love,
Roger
    The business of the cello and Morlais is unclear and unexplained. He may have been contemplating work in Monaco or Nice but in the end decided to return to England. Madame Caron-Guidez later spoke to L’Echo du Nord about the day of his departure from his lodgings in Lille: “All he had was a little trunk and it was my husband who took him to the station when he went. He left us with a wonderful memory.” If this description is accurate, he must have sent his cello ahead of him.
    His departure appears to have been sudden and uncharacteristically he didn’t keep his parents informed of his arrangements. He’d been back in touch with the Black brothers who’d offered to give him work as a ship’s musician for a trial period. It was only when already at sea that he let his parents know his plans:
    Dear Parents,
    At last I can write to you. After receiving my letters you must have been surprised to discover that I was making such a strange and unexpected journey. This is what happened: after finishing at Lille I left for England and got this contract. I think that I’m going to take up my position there as I had such a good time that I haven’t been able to prevent myself from returning and am getting ready to go. It is a trial voyage I am making. That is to say, they are trying me out for two months (paid, of course) to see if I’m up to scratch and afterward I would have a good position. I hope that despite my negligence you are not angry.
    I am very well and I hope you are too. Write to me on board the Carpathia —in Trieste (Italy) or Naples if you reply later. Naples would be best. The voyage is marvelous. We left Liverpool on February 10th and passed through Gibraltar, Tangier, Algeria, Malta, Alexandria and Constantinople, then (we will call at) Trieste, Fiume, Naples and finally New York. I assure you that it is splendid. We had a storm but I wasn’t at all sea sick. I was amazed. I have very little time as the post is about to leave. I send you all my love.
    Roger
    I will write at greater length at Trieste.
    The Carpathia , soon to play such a great role in the Titanic story, had been launched in 1902 and regularly cruised from New York to the Mediterranean. In tonnage it was less than a third of the size of the Titanic and only carried one hundred passengers in first class. The two-month cruises would call in at up to fifteen ports and typically the outward journeys were populated with wealthy Americans while poorer emigrants were picked up in Naples, Fiume, and Liverpool on the way back. The bandmaster in 1912 was twenty-two-year-old Edgar Heap and on piano was William Theodore Brailey, the London musician who would transfer with Bricoux to the Titanic .
    The Carpathia arrived in Trieste, where Bricoux would post his letter on March 4, and docked there for two nights, setting sail for Fiume (now Rijeka in Croatia) on the sixth. Bricoux omitted to mention the next ports of call—Messina and Palermo in Italy. There was an overnight stay in Naples on March 14, but he used the opportunity to take a one-day excursion (perhaps to Pompeii) leaving no time to write the promised letter to his parents.
    On March 5, in Hanley, Staffordshire, an eighteen-year-old domestic servant named Adelaide Kelsall gave birth to a daughter whom she named Laura. Adelaide told her family that the father was a cellist about to join the Titanic . The father’s name was left off the birth certificate and the only clues as to any possible connection with