Gill Paul - Women and Children First - Bravery, love and fate - the untold story of the doomed Titanic

Lady Juliette Mason-Parker knelt on the bathroom floor, acid scorching her throat and the taste of vomit in her mouth. The floor was tiled with a black and white diagonal diamond-within-diamond motif. Some diamonds had black centres while others were white. She counted the number from the toilet across to the bath: exactly fourteen. Who decided that? Was it calculated precisely to work that way? She supposed it must be. Everything on the Titanic seemed meticulously designed, nothing left to chance.

The bathroom fittings were real marble. It seemed remarkable to her that the ship could stay afloat with the weight of all its fixtures and fittings: the library full of books, the swimming pool, the extravagant cut-glass chandeliers in every public room, the carved oak panelling on the walls and the enormous pieces of mahogany furniture. It was much more luxurious than their draughty family pile in Gloucestershire. A student of decorative styles could learn all they needed on board, Juliette mused, as they wandered from the Jacobean dining saloon to the Louis XIV restaurant to the Georgian-style lounge. Their suite had a French feel, with tapestries in rococo frames on the walls and heavy patterned drapes closing off the sleeping areas during daytime.

In the next room, her mother slept soundly, occasionally snuffling and murmuring in her sleep. The last thing Juliette wanted was for her to awake and start fussing. If ever there was a woman who enjoyed fussing, it was Lady Mason-Parker. She had been irritating Juliette beyond measure on this voyage. If it wasn’t her endless advice on which hat to wear for breakfast, and which gown was suitable for walking on the promenade in the afternoon, then it was her lectures on how to ensnare a husband, with methods that Juliette considered had gone out with Jane Austen. Men nowadays liked women with a bit of conversation in them rather than smiling fools, but Lady Mason-Parker felt that Juliette’s forthright opinions scared them off. So far mother and daughter hadn’t argued outright but tetchy barbs had been fired back and forth.

Suddenly Juliette spotted the lid of her pot of cherry tooth powder in the gap between the washbasin and the toilet. Throwing up in the middle of the night had its uses after all. She squeezed her hand in to retrieve it, then considered whether the nausea had subsided enough for her to wash out her mouth and return to bed. She rose tentatively, holding onto the basin’s edge, and regarded herself in the mirror.

Her blonde hair was pinned into waves, which were supposed to hold it in the style of the moment once the pins were removed in the morning. Whoever designed it had paid no regard to the fact that ladies had to attempt to sleep while being stabbed in a dozen different spots on their heads. Her eyes had bruised circles underneath and her skin without makeup had a faint greenish tinge. She would never get a husband looking like this, certainly not the rich American one her mother had in mind. And there was the added complication that it had to be done within a couple of months, from first meeting to proposal to marriage ceremony. The problem was that Juliette was pregnant. It was only eight weeks since the one and only time she’d had intercourse, but the signs were unmistakable. When she first caught her daughter throwing up and prised the truth out of her, Lady Mason-Parker had swung into action like a military commander.

‘We need to find you a husband straight away. English men dither so, but a rich American would be ideal. They would be over the moon to get themselves a real English Lady for a wife, and they tend to be more impulsive than Englishmen when they fall in love.’

Juliette was horrified. ‘Mother, you can’t be serious! I’m not interested in tricking some poor Yankee dupe into holy matrimony. It’s hideously immoral.’

‘What you did to get yourself into this condition was immoral. Getting married is the way to fix it, and your husband will be delighted to have a child so soon. It will prove you’re good breeding stock.’

‘I’m not a farm animal! And I refuse to cooperate with your schemes.’

Juliette’s protests were in vain. Her mother booked them a passage on the Titanic’s maiden voyage, calculating that the ship would be overflowing with eligible American millionaires. Since they sailed, she had occupied herself making enquiries of crusty dowagers in the lounge and arranging introductions to crass Americans who sold automobile components or garden fencing. Juliette had no choice but to converse with the men in question, but at some stage she would find a way to put them off. Mentioning her support for women’s suffrage seemed a foolproof method.

‘Have you chained yourself to the railings at Parliament yet?’ one gent had asked tentatively at dinner that evening.

‘No, but I rather think I might some time,’ Juliette had replied. ‘It looks fun.’

‘She’s joking, of course.’ Her mother leapt in to try and salvage the relationship, but the merest hint was usually enough for them to take fright. No man wanted a suffragette for a wife.

Quite apart from the dishonesty of tricking someone into marriage, Juliette didn’t want to be legally entwined for eternity to an American millionaire. She had a strong suspicion she wouldn’t like living in America, even though she had never been there before. She liked Gloucestershire and her horses and her friends; she enjoyed the fundraising she did for charity, which she knew she was good at. If only this whole unfortunate pregnancy could be over as quickly as possible then life could go back to normal.

She favoured Plan B, which was that, in the event her mother failed to entice some rich gent to propose to her during the crossing, they would rent a small house in upstate New York, sit out the remainder of the pregnancy then have the baby adopted through a Christian adoption society. Juliette could return to England and the life she’d known before with no one any the wiser. Even her own father and brother had no idea about her pregnancy; they thought she and her mother were simply visiting some distant American cousins. And as for the baby’s father, he would never find out.

Charles Wood was their local member of parliament, and quite high up in the Liberal party. Juliette had been introduced to him because of her charity work, and one weekend he had invited her to a house party on his estate. It was there, after an invigorating evening of discussion with distinguished guests who even included the prime minister’s daughter, Violet Asquith, that Juliette had allowed Charles to come to her bedroom while the others slept. She had been flattered by his interest in her. Her head was turned. She had heard whispers of other girls who had done ‘it’, but not of any who got caught out. It was her own stupidity to develop a crush on a married man and get carried away without the least thought for the consequences.

There had been no point in telling Charles. What could he have done? In the unlikely event he offered to divorce his wife and marry her, he would have destroyed his parliamentary career. In 1912, no one would countenance a divorced MP. Besides, her mother would never have allowed the marriage. She had much grander plans for her eldest daughter. Juliette must either marry money or she must marry landed gentry, as her younger brother would inherit the Mason-Parker estate. She had been born to a titled family and must uphold the standards set by her own upbringing, which meant no commoner was good enough (unless he happened to be sufficiently loaded to make such criteria insignificant).