Saudade | Titanic (Tommy Ryan)

III

"Where do you think you've been?" Ruth asked sharply, approaching her daughter as if her shorter build would intimidate her. "You rudely dismissed yourself from tea and then were missing at dinner. You're lucky I didn't have Mr. Lovejoy looking for you!"

"Don't get yourself so worked up, Mother," Lucy responded carelessly, removing the pins from her hair one by one as she slipped a packet of cigarettes from beside her bed into her skirt-pocket so her mother wouldn't see them. "I was just exploring the ship in all its glory."

"For three hours?!" Ruth raised her voice, but quickly tutted herself back down to inside-volume. "Lucinda, you better not have been sleeping around. If I find out you have somehow found a way to crop up a reputation for God-knows-what on this ship, I will personally see to it that you are disciplined appropriately."

Lucy turned towards her mother again, scoffing. "Is that what you think of me? Admit it, Mother, you resent me."

"If that's what you think, why don't you get out of my sight?" Ruth asked her. "My name deserves more than the soil you are burying it in."

"And what exactly does your name deserve?" she spat. "What does your name deserve for using your youngest daughter to safeguard your gold after attempting it with me first? Tell me."

"You know what is on the line here."

"Of course, I do, I simply learned not to care. I would rather be a seamstress than keep on living in this miserable prison. You love Rose to pieces, not because she is your daughter, but because you know that she is afraid of you and that man in there!"

Lucy jabbed her finger towards the door. She didn't care who heard her. "Your act is transparent, and you are the most selfish woman I have ever known. I am only here because I refuse to leave Rose alone with you."

"Nonsense," Ruth discarded, laughing it off as if the words weren't tugging at her heartstrings, or true, for that matter. "Rose knows what she's doing. She's going to save us from the debts your father left us with. If anyone is selfish here, it is you, Lucinda."

Lucy stared hot knives into her mother's eyes, and she wanted to scream. "Father did not choose to die. He did not choose to get sick. What did you do about it? Nothing! You never cared for him."

"Do you not understand how this world works?" Ruth asked calmly, going to squeeze her eldest daughter's upper arm. "When you're a woman and you wish to succeed, that is all you can do."

Lucy shook her head. "No. It isn't. Women can work. They do work in America. Just you wait, I will do it. I will prove it to you."

"Oh, sure," Ruth belittled. "You will soon give up and marry an aristocrat. I did the same. Your father walked into the factory I was a seamstress in, and I took the first chance I could to obtain a better life."

The spite on Lucy's face fueled by the urge to spit at her mother made her take a breath. "He loved you, truly, and all you spoke about at his funeral was how devastated you were, about losing the damn money!"

"You don't know what it was like."

"No, but I know what it was like when father was still here," Lucinda's voice lowered. "Rose and I were loved. It will never be the same with just you, and that is why I am itching for the chance to get away from you."

"Do it, then. I am simply past caring now."

"Then, let Rose go with me."

"Never," Ruth snickered. "Have you heard yourself? You are an absurd demon child."

"Then, you're stuck with me," Lucy told her mother quietly. "You're stuck with me until you have lost. I'm not like you, and neither is Rose, no matter how much you gaslight her into believing she is."