Women and Children First: Bravery, love and fate: the untold story of the doomed Titanic

Chapter Sixty-One

Reg completed the letter to his mother – a simple…

Chapter Sixty-Two

Mr Grayling hadn’t been to the house since the previous…

Chapter Sixty-Three

The days when Juliette could wear a corset were long…

Chapter Sixty-Four

From the first day at the summer house, Molly started…

Chapter Sixty-Five

Father Kelly knocked on the door one morning and asked…

Chapter Sixty-Six

In early August, a storm blew up the Atlantic coast…

Chapter Sixty-Seven

Somewhere in the depths of his brain, Reg became aware…

Chapter Sixty-Eight

Juliette couldn’t stop torturing herself with visions of Robert escorting…

Chapter Sixty-Nine

When Reg awoke, it was daylight outside and the storm…

Chapter Seventy

Juliette scribbled a very simple note: ‘Am in New York…

Chapter Seventy-One

It was getting dark as Reg walked over Brooklyn Bridge.

Chapter Seventy-Two

As soon as Juliette woke the next day, she rang…

Chapter Seventy-Three

Juliette didn’t have time to be nervous as Robert dashed…

Chapter Seventy-Four

Reg didn’t know where to find a police station. In…

Chapter Seventy-Five

Reg had a lot of time to worry while the…

Chapter Seventy-Six

Later that night, George Grayling sat at his desk with…

Chapter Seventy-Seven

As arranged, Robert came to the hotel at six and…

Chapter Seventy-Eight

After the newspaper story about her appeared, Annie was alarmed…

Chapter Seventy-Nine

When Reg turned up at the Cunard Line office to…

Epilogue

Reg and Florence got married a week before Christmas 1912…

TITANIC

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Enjoyed this book? Read on for the start of Gill Paul’s new novel, Another Woman’s Husband. (#litres_trial_promo)

Other Books by Gill Paul

About the Publisher

Prologue

Reg’s hands were shaking so hard he couldn’t hold the newspaper still enough to read. He sat on a bunk and smoothed the pages open on the shabby grey blanket, ironing the creases with his hand. Lists of names in tiny type covered the surface, organised into uneven columns of surnames, forenames, the class in which each person had travelled, and finally their country of origin.

Straight away he saw an error: Luigi Gatti was listed as Spanish rather than Italian. How could he trust this list if they could make such a simple mistake? Was anything in it reliable? Abbing, Abbott, Abelson … Ernest Abbott. That must be Ernie who worked in the mess, but they had him down as a third-class passenger. Poor old Ernie.

His finger scrolled down the page. There was Colonel Astor, with the same number of words by his name as anyone else. All that money couldn’t buy him a place on the other, shorter list, the list of survivors. There was Bill, who had slept in the next bunk, and Ethel from the pantry, the one they called Fat Ethel. If only they’d been kinder …