What the Water Kept

In the spring of 1912, the Fortune family of Winnipeg boarded the RMS Titanic at Southampton as first-class passengers, returning from a Grand Tour of Europe gifted to the children by their father, Mark Fortune — one of Manitoba's wealthiest self-made real estate magnates, the owner of a 36-room Tudor mansion on Wellington Crescent and a man who had, in the parlance of the age, lived up to his name. Travelling with him were his wife Mary, his son Charles, and his three daughters: the engaged and quietly apprehensive Ethel, the vivacious Alice, and the youngest, Mabel, barely twenty-three. Four days into the voyage, their world divided irrevocably into the living and the dead. What the Water Kept dramatizes the Fortune sisters' experience aboard the Titanic with the full weight of historical record behind it. It opens in the warmth of the first-class dining saloon where the Fortunes rubbed shoulders with John Jacob Astor IV, Benjamin Guggenheim, and Isidor and Ida Straus — the gilded upper deck of Edwardian civilization, suspended for four days between the Old World and the New. Then, in the early hours of April 15, it traces the sisters' movements through a sinking ship: Alice and Mabel ascending to the boat deck and entering Lifeboat 7 — the first to be launched, and not filled to capacity — pressing their jewelry into Charles's hands before departure; Ethel returning to her cabin to search for her mother, being found there by a butler and escorted in near-darkness to Lifeboat 10 just as it descended; and Mary Fortune, sixty years old, settled in the boat already, watching the stern of the Titanic lift itself against the stars at approximately 2:30 in the morning.