Titanic: True Love Forever

Chapter 32: Conspiracy

It is said that the men of this age generally possess a strong gentlemanly spirit, such as the protection of ladies and children, elegance of demeanor, and modesty and justice ...... all of which Calhokely could never have possessed.

He went so far as to tie me directly to the bed with a rope, or his bed. This suite of rooms is just two bedrooms, one is Rose Bookout's, the remaining bedroom is of course in front of the eyes of this just tied up my completely ungentlemanly unlucky ghost. With a look of exhaustion and loss of image, he reached out and dragged the bedside chair straight out of the way, sat down on his ass, and then with a face full of annoyance, used his hands to vigorously smooth back those messy hair on his head a bit.

Lovejoy stood in the doorway with his hands behind his back, those watchful little eyes occasionally slanting lightly our way.

I don't want to describe my current position at all; with my hands tied to the headrail of the bed, it's hard for me to tilt my neck up and bite through the knots, no matter how soft my bones are.

Carl was sitting in a chair, his hand propped up on his forehead, the clothes he hadn't had time to return, his shirt torn wide open to reveal a chest of healthy color. He stole a glance at me with a particularly creepy look, and when I looked back, he averted his eyes again, and licked his lips nervously, only to lick the cut at the corner of his mouth and stifle the pain to the point of frowning.

I secretly tugged on the rope around my wrist, the old poodle didn't know where to get it, it was really strong. I glanced at the old poodle in the doorway and realized that he was looking out particularly faithfully, as if he was worried that someone might come by.

I took a deep breath, attempting to disengage from the grumpy feeling that I had just gotten out of a fight and lost, before inquiring in a flat tone, "It's almost seven o'clock, at night, April eleventh?"

Carl reached up and tugged at his tattered clothes; he looked very uncomfortable with his lack of clothing, and the corners of his mouth pursed down even harder with the unlucky look of a debtor. When he heard my question, he didn't answer, but simply reached out and signaled the old poodle, and Lovejoy at the door immediately pulled out the watch in his own pocket, opened it, and chimed in with a serious count. "Six forty-five p.m. Today is April eleventh, 1912." When he had finished his report, he also naturally took out a box of cigarettes, and, coming to Carl's side, took one out and handed it to him, with a matchbox attached.

Carl took the cigarettes and clipped them to his fingers as soon as he had lighted them himself. The old poodle, seeing that his task was accomplished, went right back to the door again, looked out grimly, and stood guard with the spirit of an evil dragon guarding its treasure.

"It's been over four hours since the Titanic left Queenston, and now we're in the middle of the Atlantic, so even if you ran out now, there's no way out of here." Carl took a drag on his cigarette, easing that inexplicable tension, then looked at me through the rising smoke, an obscure expression on his face.

More than four hours, at the twenty-odd nautical mile speed of this huge ship, I just jumped into the sea right now and only drowned. It felt like all of a sudden, a certain force that was strongly holding up my body instantly collapsed, and the hands that were secretly exerting themselves also hung down weakly. I looked at the headlight that had just been lit above my head with two lifeless eyes, it's good that I accidentally even hitched myself in this adventure. How many third-class passengers died? More than half the female passengers died, as I recall. The men were even worse, not even a hundred of the four or five hundred survived.

Why don't I go down to the galley and put a fruit knife to Ismay's neck and ask him to stop the ship? It's the end of the world when fifteen hundred people are dying in front of you.

"I hear that you think the Titanic is going to sink?" Carl calmed down, and he looked at me without expression, losing that grumpy twist that gave him that particularly cold capitalist air.

I looked at him breathlessly as he teetered, leaning back in his chair, his hand on the armrest, a cigarette idly held between his fingers. If you ignore his disheveled clothes and hair, this kind of sitting posture of his is particularly manly, and with a uniformed valet standing beside him, the picture of an upper-class kind of loser comes out.

"The Titanic will sink?" He curled the corners of his mouth disdainfully, revealing a full ten sneer, "How do you know such ridiculous news?"

A hundred years later, everyone knew.

I raised my eyes in boredom in an effort to look at the ropes tied to a piece on the bed railing, not bothering to pay attention to the i***t who had gotten me killed. If the situation hadn't allowed it, I would have hated to take a piece of rope and tie him up and beat him severely.

"It can't sink, okay?" Carl didn't even need my answer, getting high on himself and bragging smugly to the side, "I've seen its drawings, its design, it's the most advanced vehicle in the world, and the safest. Not a single person believes that it will sink. Even if it does sink, it can't be a maiden voyage."

Yes, yes, yes, so even if I said right now that it would hit an iceberg and be done for, you could punch me in the face with a million reasons. I finally researched that the material on the railing is brass.

"You shouldn't have known it would 'sink', did you think you were on the Olympic?" Carl suddenly stops that mocking grin that makes you want to flatten him, and his tone turns sharply downward, becoming very serious and sinister. He leaned forward and approached me easily, close enough that I could see the scratches on his chest and smell the strong odor of smoke on him.

It was the first time I'd ever seen such an expression on his face, he was more of a smug and proud man, and now there was no trace of that brainless friendliness on his face. He looked at me grimly, the amber pupils of his eyes seeming to hide large swathes of brooding guile, the cigarette on his fingers slowly burning out, the ash pausing on the tip before falling to the carpet beside the bed.

What's it to do with the Olympic? I suddenly had a bad feeling, did he misunderstand something?

"Who are you?" Carl asked suddenly, a commanding and oppressive interrogation.

"Emily." I didn't bother to give him a wide-eyed look and answered directly, introducing myself painlessly since I didn't identify much with the largely unused English name anyway.

"Full name." My uncooperative attitude clearly angered this thuggish second generation who wanted the wind and the rain, and Carl didn't even sit in his chair anymore, just leaning over the bed in an attempt to oppress me with his tall figure.

"Emily." I calmly continued to fool him with the same answer.

"Your last name." He bites into his cigarette, but realizes it's burned out and casually tosses it away to the side in a motion that would have spelled street punk. The maid who cleaned his room would have a hard time, didn't he have anywhere else to throw his cigarette butts?

"No, orphan." The answer choked him to death, an orphan who didn't know his mom and dad's last name.

"Orphan?" He unnaturally showed that high and mighty mocking smile again, then somewhat reluctantly bit his lower lip and asked in a low voice, "What did you used to do for a living?"

Before? How long ago? I danced for a living before I crossed over. Then when I broke my leg I lived off bank interest. When the plane crashed and I ended up on the streets of England, I basically made a living doing odd jobs, betting and selling, or begging for a loaf of bread from some nice woman.

Come to think of it, I've had a wonderful few months. The lives of the people at the bottom of the British ladder are so rich that a hundred tome could be written about them.

Perhaps I had been thinking about it too long and before I could answer Carl had already stepped aside to finish brainstorming an answer for me. He immediately said, "No more stealing, nothing good comes of thievery."

I didn't steal that watch, I hung it up myself.

"You're very nimble, could it be that you overheard the news when you went into the shipyards in Belfast to steal materials." He murmured curiously, his hand habitually touching the jeweled ring on his pinky finger, before retorting to himself, "There's no way such crucial information could have gotten out."

What information?

Perhaps it was the overly obvious look in my eyes that Carl finally noticed me, and his face scrunched up in concentration. "Where did you get this information that the Titanic would sink."

I finally felt that something was wrong with him, he cared very much about the words that the Titanic would sink. But I didn't understand what he cared about, didn't he think it was a dream ship that would never sink?

"You think the Titanic will sink?" As I thought about it, I felt that the only way he could have read it that way was if the news was true. But after saying that and contemplating it a bit more, I thought it was impossible, if he thought the ship would sink, then was he still dragging his family on the Titanic with the intention of committing suicide?

I remember this guy in the movie, but he was a vicious person who could kick those survivalists out of the lifeboats in order to stay alive.

"It will sink, huh ......" he sneered a few times, suddenly pulled down his face again, suppressed his voice grimly, "You answered correctly, the Titanic was supposed to sink. Ismay and White Star's upper echelons had held such a meeting, because the Olympic had suffered a serious collision during the trial voyage, White Star had been unable to make ends meet, and had to rely on the newly-built cruise ship to recover its funds. But this disaster has made them worse off, and with the insurance company refusing to pay the claim, there is a good chance that Ismay will soon be bankrupt and destitute."

Pauper is a particularly mean and disdainful word for him to say.

Why we were talking about business, though, I looked at him with a puzzled expression.

The guy finally didn't look so unlucky when he talked about this stuff, he was serious and confident, even with a bit of unconscious complacency, and it looked like he'd been in the business world of intrigue for so long that he seemed particularly comfortable and relaxed.

"He has to make his ship profitable soon, but there's no way to make enough money to get through the crisis on the freshly launched Titanic alone, and even the Titanic's tickets aren't really sold out, so even if it's the most luxurious ship in the world it's still just as unlikely to save the White Star Company." Carl stood up as he spoke, he walked over to the table and lifted the bottle of wine inside the ice bucket and poured himself a glass of wine. He shook the goblet with a familiar motion and then looked down and sniffed it, then lifted the glass up and looked at the wine inside and continued to talk eloquently.

"So he's going to implement a very bold idea, which is to have the Titanic go and hit an iceberg a few days into its voyage, bringing the dreamy unsinkable ship to a complete end."

Saying this, Carl suddenly paused for a moment, and then he revealed an excited smile, "I like this idea, you need this kind of boldness in business." After saying that, he raised his glass as if to celebrate something and clinked the air, then drank it all in one go.

"He did that on purpose, to hit an iceberg?" What did I hear? A psycho sociopathic freakout? It's just that you don't have to go broke to drag two thousand people to their deaths on purpose.

"Yeah, just sink the ship and blackmail a huge amount of money out of the insurance company. And this genius idea started out with the real owners of White Star Line, just replace the crashed Olympic with the Titanic, which was going to make its maiden voyage, then they could use the unrepaired Olympic to travel to the Icebergs and make the plan work."

Holy crap, what a crappy plan.

Swap the Titanic for the crashed Olympic, then have passengers who bought tickets on the Titanic sit on the Olympic and get driven to hit an iceberg to blackmail the insurance money?

White Star's entire staff has been hit by an iceberg and their brains have been cracked, where is their IQ?

Also, if this is the Olympic, then how did this greedy bastard in front of me get on board and still be so calm. Did I wrongly blame him, he's actually not afraid of death at all, and is still very brave.

"For the sake of this plan, White Star also deployed the California to tail the entire ship, and when the ship sinks, it will come in handy to come and pick up all the passengers."

Carl leaned over the table, he was facing me lying on the bed, holding an empty wine glass, his short black hair plastered to his forehead and a cozy smile on his face. It seemed like someone planning a ship to hit an iceberg and blackmail the insurance money was something to celebrate.

Suddenly I saw a bunch of horrible cannibalistic capitalists who would do anything for money, rubbing human lives in their hands without mercy, as ugly as a money printing machine that used other people's flesh and blood as its power source.

Karl Hockley, on the other hand, talks about such schemes with a champagne face.

It's a crazy world, even more grotesque and incomprehensible than when I was caught up in the art of dance.

I whispered, "It didn't get anyone, it didn't get ...... any passengers." Slowly, my voice fades, this ship is going to kill a lot of people, more than you can believe.

"You're right." Carl cheerfully tosses the bottle back into the ice bucket and says with an unchanged smile, "The California won't receive any passengers because it's the Titanic, not the Olympic. The audacious plan ended up being aborted, it would have had to go ahead, but I gave White Star a large sum of money, enough to tide them over this crisis."

I no longer know what expression to put on is more appropriate, this guy in front of me is simply complacent to the sky, he is like a vain ghost who just made a large sum of money and is eager to share it with others and desires to be worshipped.

"My money saved White Star Corporation, and now I hold a large amount of White Star's stock in my hands. I see the potential of this company, and as long as the Titanic sails well, then with the determination of the company's upper echelons, White Star will continue to be brilliant, and the stocks in my hands can be another successful business for me."

Carl retraced his steps to the bed, and with some haste he passed a finger next to his lips, his smile fading, and then his hands went uncomfortably to his pockets. He seemed to have very little confidence in what he was going to say next, and was a very different man from what he had been a moment before.

The difference between an elite businessman with a black heart and a shy schoolboy facing his teacher.

"So, the ship won't sink. It's the real Titanic, and Ismay is on board, and he's not going to order the captain to hit an iceberg. I've paid a lot of money so they won't replace the Titanic with the Olympic, you can look around, it's new, we're the only ones who've ever laid in this bed, so you don't have to be afraid."

I wanted to smile and agree with him, as he was pleased to do, that the ship hadn't been switched, so it wouldn't sink, but ......

Carl bent over, his thick eyelashes clear in my line of sight, and the light color in his pupils intensified, deep as a deep valley sprinkled with morning sunlight. He said in a low voice, "You didn't register on the ship, remember not to talk to anyone about such a dangerous topic as the ship will sink in the future, because the White Star side won't allow this kind of plan to be leaked, and if they learn that you've already found out about it, they'll try to do everything they can to keep your mouth shut. An orphan without any identification, no one would know if he disappeared."

I looked at him in silence, the tips of my bound fingers trembling a little uncontrollably.

Now this Carl looked, terribly gentle.

Slowly he reached out and touched my cheek soothingly, repeating the same words again, "It's the Titanic, and I'll make sure it never sinks, so you don't have to be afraid anymore, Emily."

I finally couldn't help but give a bitter look, but this damn ship, it really did sink in the end.

It crashed into an iceberg... The ship really did sink... Ah.