Lauriat chose the Lusitania specifically because of its speed. Ordinarily he preferred small, slow boats, “but this year,” he wrote, “I wanted to make my business trip as short as possible.” At the Lusitania’s top speed of 25 knots, he expected to arrive in Liverpool on Friday, May 7, and reach London in time to start work on Saturday morning, May 8. He planned to travel with a friend, Lothrop Withington, an authority on genealogy who had a particular expertise in the old records of Salem, Massachusetts, and Canterbury, England. Both men were married, but for this trip were leaving their wives behind. Lauriat had four children, one a baby, whose picture he planned to bring along.
He packed five pieces of luggage: a leather briefcase, a small valise, an extension suitcase, a large shoe case, and his steamer trunk. Dinner required formal wear and all that went with it. His various day suits required shoes of differing styles. There were braces and socks, ties and cufflinks. He also packed his favorite Knickerbocker suit, with its characteristic knickers, which he planned to wear while strolling the deck.
He and Withington were set to take the midnight train to New York, on Thursday, April 29, but first Lauriat stopped at his bookstore. There a colleague opened the store’s safe and handed him two volumes, each with a cover that measured 12 by 14 inches. These were scrapbooks, but of a high order. One contained fifty-four line drawings, the other sixty-four drawings, all done by the Victorian author William Makepeace Thackeray to illustrate his own works. At one time, Thackeray, who died in 1863 and whose best-known work was Vanity Fair, had been nearly as popular as Charles Dickens, and his satirical stories, essays, and serialized novels were widely and avidly read in such magazines as Fraser’s and Punch. His drawings and books and just about any other artifact from his life—all known as “Thackerayana”—were coveted by collectors on both sides of the Atlantic, but especially in America.
Lauriat took the scrapbooks back to his home in Cambridge, where he inspected them in the company of his wife, Marian. He then packed them, carefully, in his extension suitcase, and locked it. At the station later that night, he checked his trunk and shoe box for transport direct to the Lusitania but held back his other three pieces. He kept these with him in the railcar.
He and Withington reached New York early the next morning, Friday, April 30, the day before the Lusitania was scheduled to sail, and here they temporarily parted company. Lauriat took a taxi to the home of his sister, Blanche, and her husband, George W. Chandler, at 235 West Seventy-first Street in Manhattan. Lauriat had one more task to complete before departure.
AT THE Waldorf Astoria, at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-third Street, first-class passenger Margaret Mackworth, thirty-one, packed her things in a fog of gloom and depression. She dreaded her return to England. It meant going back to a dead marriage of seven years and a life oppressed by war.
She had arrived in New York the previous month, alone, after a tedious ten-day crossing, to join her father, D. A. Thomas, a prominent businessman, who was already in the city for discussions on ventures ranging from mines to Mississippi barges. She was delighted and relieved to find him waiting for her on the dock. “In 1915, to come out into sunlit April New York, care-free and happy, after being under the heavy cloud of war at home, was an unspeakable relief,” she recalled.
The city charmed her. “In the evenings—almost every evening—we went out, either to the theatre or to dinner parties,” she wrote. She bought dresses, paid for by her father, including a long black velvet gown that she loved. She saw her customary shyness—an “annihilating” shyness—begin to subside, and she began for the first time in her life to feel like a social asset to her father, rather than a liability. (Her shyness, however, had not kept her from fighting for women’s suffrage back in England, in the course of which she jumped on the running board of a prime minister’s car and blew up a mailbox with a bomb.) “Those weeks of openhearted American hospitality and forth-comingness, of frankly expressed pleasure in meeting one, did something for me that made a difference to the whole of the rest of my life,” she wrote.
She dropped her shyness “overboard” on that holiday. “I have always been grateful to New York for that,” she wrote. “And, finally, it was one of the last times when I consciously felt quite young.”
Although she and her father would be traveling in first class on one of the most luxurious vessels the world had known, all she felt now was sorrow and regret.