A stowaway, a stolen book, a murderous villain: an adventure on the most famous shipwreck in history.
The great ocean liner Titanic is preparing to cross the Atlantic. On board is a sinister thief bent on stealing a rare book that may be the key to unlocking infinite treasure, a wealthy academic traveling home to America with his rare book collection, and Patrick Waters, a twelve-year-old Irish boy who is certain that his job as a steward on the unsinkable ship will be the adventure of a lifetime. In Dangerous Waters, disguises, capers, and danger abound as the ship makes its way toward that fateful iceberg where Patrick will have to summon all his wits in order to survive.
A stowaway, a stolen book, a murderous villain: an adventure on the most famous shipwreck in history.
The great ocean liner Titanic is preparing to cross the Atlantic. On board is a sinister thief bent on stealing a rare book that may be the key to unlocking infinite treasure, a wealthy academic traveling home to America with his rare book collection, and Patrick Waters, a twelve-year-old Irish boy who is certain that his job as a steward on the unsinkable ship will be the adventure of a lifetime. In Dangerous Waters, disguises, capers, and danger abound as the ship makes its way toward that fateful iceberg where Patrick will have to summon all his wits in order to survive.
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
A stowaway, a stolen book, a murderous villain: an adventure on the most famous shipwreck in history.
The great ocean liner Titanic is preparing to cross the Atlantic. On board is a sinister thief bent on stealing a rare book that may be the key to unlocking infinite treasure, a wealthy academic traveling home to America with his rare book collection, and Patrick Waters, a twelve-year-old Irish boy who is certain that his job as a steward on the unsinkable ship will be the adventure of a lifetime. In Dangerous Waters, disguises, capers, and danger abound as the ship makes its way toward that fateful iceberg where Patrick will have to summon all his wits in order to survive.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429961844 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Roaring Brook Press |
| Publication date: | 03/14/2025 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 241 |
| Lexile: | 770L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 9 - 12 Years |
About the Author
Gregory Mone is the author of the novel Fish. He is a graduate of Harvard and lives in Massachusetts with his wife and two children.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
SAVED BY CERVANTES
Long after midnight, a short-haired man of average height crossed from London's Kensington Gardens to Mount Street, headed east. Mr. John Francis Berryman had walked silently through the damp, thick grass of the park, but now his oversized heels clacked loudly as he stepped onto the cobblestone street. The noise was unacceptable, even if no other souls were out at that hour. He would have to be more careful. Silent. Ideally he would proceed unnoticed, steal the book, and return to his small flat within the hour.
Steal: such a harsh, stubborn word. Was this truly stealing? He planned to return the book once he and Mr. Rockwell found what they needed. And besides, the book's owner, Harry Elkins Widener, was so wealthy that he could hardly be stolen from. They had been in school together, at Harvard College, and Harry never once had to worry about money. His family owned streetcar lines, railroads, and office buildings. He lived in a one-hundred-five-room mansion and had begun amassing his noted collection of rare — and, in Berryman's estimation, largely superficial — books at a mere twenty-one years of age.
Berryman, on the other hand, dragged behind him a heavy chain of debts. He owed money to his grocer, his tailor, numerous professors and colleagues, even one of his students. His shoemaker was holding no less than three pairs of his boots, vowing not to restore them until he was paid in full, and the local baker refused to loan him so much as a roll.
None of this was Mr. Berryman's fault. The cruel, unbalanced world had thrust him into his present predicament. And this, he believed, granted him the right to borrow from those more fortunate. He walked carefully ahead.
South Audley Street was all shadows. No lights shone through the windows looking over the narrow street. No candles burned, no streetlamps glowed, and Quaritch Booksellers, he noted with pleasure, was particularly lifeless.
A low scuffling sound startled him. He turned, grabbed his knife, saw nothing; a rat, presumably.
At the door to the shop he glanced once more along the length of the dark, wet street, inserted the key he'd lifted off that foolish clerk earlier in the day, and entered. He took a moment to bask: He might not have been the best of thieves, but he doubted that any other scholars possessed such skill.
Inside, he breathed in the musty, aged smell of thousands of books. That book dust was fresh sea air to him. So much weathered leather, so many brittle yellowing pages. All that hardened cloth and browned book-binding glue. He found it completely invigorating.
Yet he had no time to browse the shelves. He had an assignment. He was to procure the rare second edition of Sir Francis Bacon's Essaies before Quaritch shipped it off to Widener's Philadelphia mansion.
The door to the old book dealer's second floor office was open. The electric lights would be too bright, too conspicuous, so he lit a small candle with the deft flick of a match and examined several boxes of books stacked about the room. Widener's supply was sitting near the door, packaged and ready to sail for America.
The anticipation forced his hands to quiver, but the value of the books demanded that he work with the utmost care. He delicately cut open the box and removed each precious volume. The books were either preserved in hard clothbound cases or wrapped in several layers of soft felt.
The size and thickness of each item varied, but the book he sought would be thin. The Essaies were really little more than an extended pamphlet, so there was no need to inspect the larger volumes. This realization allowed him to arrive sooner at a terribly unfortunate conclusion.
The Essaies were gone.
But how? Berryman knew that Widener had instructed Quaritch to buy the book for him. Quaritch had completed the sale a few days before. All of Widener's other purchases were there. The old bookseller had to have the Essaies.
He rushed to Quaritch's desk, sat in the old man's place, laid his hands on the leather-topped surface. Applying more care than the dealer deserved, Berryman opened Quaritch's ledger and flipped through the thin, dry pages. His hands and fingers were shaking. His jaw locked shut. On the last page he found it: A note from that very day recording a visit from Harry Elkins Widener. Mr. Berryman held his candle close and read:
Visit from HEW. Nice young man. Paid in full and looked upon the books with angelic devotion. Should be a lucrative customer. Interested in Cruikshank and RLS in particular. Very, very happy to see that the Bacon was his. Ordered the lot to be sent to Philadelphia, except for the Essaies, which he's taking aboard the new ocean liner, Titanic. If I'm shipwrecked, he said, the Bacon will go with me.
The spoiled, rich fool! Berryman slapped his hand down hard on the desk.
A moment later he heard footsteps. Someone was ascending the stairs: The glow of a candle on the wall outside the door brightened with each step.
Berryman moistened the pads of his forefinger and thumb with his tongue, prepared to extinguish his own candle, then stopped himself. The person would have seen the glow. If he were to extinguish the flame now, they'd know for sure that there was an intruder and call for help. Instead Berryman rushed to the door and waited, standing aside.
The careful footsteps stopped outside the office, and then an old, hunched-over figure walked through. Berryman could assume no risk: He leaped forward and pushed the man to the floor, but the man grasped Berryman's ankle as he fell. Berryman tumbled as he tried to flee.
The candle still glowed; in the dim light he could see that it was old Quaritch himself.
Berryman tried to shake and kick his way free, but the old bookseller would not let go.
"Thief!" Quaritch yelled. "Help, thief!"
Berryman promptly struck the old man on the head with the heel of his boot. Quaritch released him, whimpering like a pitiful, injured dog. There was little choice now, as the bookseller had surely seen him. Berryman reached inside his coat and removed the knife.
The shouts for help ceased. Quaritch stared at the blade, confused and frightened at once. Berryman always thought that his preferred weapon, a knife typically used to slice free the uncut pages of newly printed books, was uniquely clever, and he was happy to see that the irony was not lost on Quaritch.
The old man crawled away backwards, his knees upturned like a spider's legs. A rivulet of blood ran down his forehead, spreading in the wrinkles of his brow.
Quaritch stopped at the base of one of the room's many mountainous bookshelves and began pulling books down from the shelves, surrounding himself with the texts as if he were trying to form an impenetrable, book-built shield. He piled them on his lap, in front of his stomach, and clutched them to his chest.
In the dim candlelight Berryman saw clearly that they were rare, valuable classics. Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens, Herman Melville's Moby Dick, even a copy of one of Mr. Berryman's favorites, Cervantes' Don Quixote.
He had no choice but to lower the knife; he could not bear the thought of such precious books stained with that old man's blood. Most of all, he could not hurt the Quijote. He pocketed his weapon and moved toward the door, deeper into the shadows. "You have not seen me," he said. "I have stolen nothing."
"Yes, yes," Mr. Quaritch answered, "I have not seen you."
Mr. Berryman hurried down the stairs, out to South Audley Street, and back toward the park.
"Thief! Thief!" he heard the old, frightened bookseller shouting weakly in the distance.
But he was not a thief. John Francis Berryman was a scholar. A man of the mind and a lover of books.
CHAPTER 2PRIDE OF BELFAST
In the kitchen of O'Neill's, a small alehouse crammed between a funeral parlor and a shoemaker's shop in the heart of Belfast, young Patrick Waters plunged the last of a night's worth of glasses into the sink. He dunked it beneath the soapy surface, wiped it once with a rag, rinsed it quickly, and set it to dry on a white towel spread across the counter. Then he stopped, attempted to dry his water-wrinkled hands on his partially-soaked shirt, and listened.
Patrick, twelve years old and tall, was a very good listener. He could hear whispered words at a great distance, and although there was no scientific reason to suggest this was true, most people who knew him attributed this ability to his embarrassingly large ears. They were big enough for a man twice his size and leaned out, and slightly forward, at the tops, as if they were designed to catch sounds.
He let his hair grow long enough to cover his ears, yet they still poked out far enough to earn him a handful of undesirable nicknames. Boys at his old school, St. Mark's, called him Jack the Donkey, and the men at O'Neill's referred to him as Pegasus, the famous winged horse. "Fly off with those gargantuan ears and fetch me another stout, Pegasus!" they'd shout laughing.
Now, with his work for the day finished, Patrick aimed those ears out toward the bar, on the other side of the swinging door leading in and out of the kitchen. The place was nearly empty. Only Mr. Joyce, the barman, and a few customers remained, and they were talking, as they often had in recent weeks, about Titanic, the great ocean liner that was being built right there in Belfast.
The voices were familiar: the bearlike growl of Mr. McNulty, who owned a small bookstore on Donegall Street; the thick country accent of Mr. Reilly, and, of course, Mr. Joyce's deep, assured baritone.
"She's finished!" Mr. Reilly declared. "Every last rivet is secure."
"John McKeown tells me there's still painting to be done," Mr. Joyce put in. He always had some scrap of rare information at hand.
"You would save that for last, though, wouldn't you?" Mr. McNulty growled. "Like any lady, Titanic will wait until the last minute to apply her makeup."
As the men laughed, Patrick tucked in his soap-splattered shirt, grabbed his wool coat and cap, and hurried out of the kitchen. Mr. Joyce, bald and red-faced, with a pencil behind each ear, rested his thick forearms on the dark, square bar. The men sat leaning on the bar before him, each of them halfway through their stouts.
"We are all washed up, Mr. Joyce," Patrick said. "Will I be going home now?"
His boss nodded, granting him permission to leave.
"Is it true your brother has a position on the ship?" Mr. Reilly asked.
"I wouldn't know," Patrick answered. "He's been at sea. I haven't heard from him for months."
"I would guess he'll be on that ship. I'd expect nothing less from the lad," Mr. Joyce said. "Your brother knows well what I've told you many times before, Patrick. You must associate yourself with greatness in this life."
Mr. Reilly looked around the pub, then placed his large hands on the bar. "Is this greatness then?" he asked with a laugh.
A bar towel flew his way, but then Mr. Joyce smiled.
Mr. McNulty raised a glass and tilted it toward Patrick. "Be sure to tell your mother that we've nearly sold the last of your father's books. And in only six months! Ah, the collection that man had," he said, turning to Mr. Joyce. "The greatest adventures and stories. Stevenson, Kipling, plus the Romans. He was a learned man, John Waters, a true scholar of the street. Though, of course, you wouldn't know it if you saw him after he'd downed his first few pints of —"
"Thank you, Mr. McNulty," Patrick interrupted. "I'll be sure to let her know."
* * *
The Waters' home was two stories tall, narrow, lonely, and usually quiet, but as Patrick approached that night he could hear laughter from the street. The front windows, at least one of them cracked, were sweating. There had to be several people inside; he thought he heard his brother.
Patrick burst in smiling and was thrown to the floor within seconds.
"Bigger every day but no faster!" James said.
Sitting on Patrick's chest, with his knees on his younger brother's shoulders, James threw several pretend punches. Patrick was destined to be tall and thin, like their father, but James was built like the Kelly men on his mother's side. If the Waters men were trees, the Kellys were boulders. Patrick squirmed, but there was no way he'd break free.
One of his brother's friends sat at the rough hewn wooden table, next to his mother. James began to cough — the familiar dry, grating cough of a man who worked with coal. Patrick twisted to one side and pushed him away, while James punched himself in the chest to quiet the rumbling.
"The cough of a working man!" his mother declared.
The other young man raised his glass. "Precisely, Mrs. Waters! The song of a stouthearted coal man."
James settled his breathing and lunged at Patrick, then stopped, smiled, and embraced him. This was his brother: big-hearted and quick-tempered, as likely to hug as to hit you.
They were almost the same height now, Patrick noticed. He was eight years younger than James, but he'd be taller in a matter of months.
"Sit with us," James said, pulling out a chair. "This is Martin Blaney, of King Street, a man with fireproof skin. I've seen him palm a hunk of hot coal that would've seared the hands of a lesser man. All four of his brothers are trimmers, too, and his father's been shoveling coal since the start of our great age of industry."
Blaney, freckle-faced, curly-haired, and thin, nodded and drank from the brown bottle before him.
"A model family," Patrick's mother added, "the kind of men who make Belfast proud."
"Martin here has been across the Atlantic six times, and he isn't yet twenty years old."
"You've been eight, though, haven't you James?" Patrick asked.
"And starting tomorrow, nine!" James declared. "Crossing the ocean on the grandest ship of all."
So it was true! His brother was actually sailing on Titanic. Like most people in Belfast, Patrick already knew all the facts about the boat they called the Queen of the Sea: Nearly nine hundred feet long, nearly one hundred feet wide, one hundred fifty-nine coal burning furnaces, twenty-nine boilers. And she was built right there in Belfast: Patrick had gone to see her up close more than once. Her iron-plated bow stood forward with such confidence, force, and power that she looked capable of steaming right through the heart of the city, pushing aside its buildings and carving a new river in her wake.
"God bless you and Titanic," his mother said, her face alight with pride.
Someday, Patrick hoped, she'd look at him that way.
"The sea trials begin at six tomorrow morning," James said. "They say half the city will be there to watch."
"They should! She's the pride of Belfast," his mother added.
"And we are the wind in her sails, stoking the fires that turn her turbines and give her speed."
"Here's to the Black Gang," Blaney added. "She'd be no more than a barge without us shoveling that coal!"
Prompted by his mother's stare, Patrick fetched a few new bottles. When he returned, Blaney pointed to the now empty bookshelf against the wall. "Planning to start a library, are you?"
"No, no!" his mother said. "We've only now rid ourselves of one, thanks be to God. I'll have no son of mine burying his head in fantasies and fairy tales like their father. My sons are workers. Isn't that right James?"
Patrick hoped his mother didn't go on. She talked about his father like he was some neighborhood drunk. She viciously mocked his failed dreams — a plan to build the first movie house in Belfast was a favorite target — and his love of books.
"If my own husband was a worker, I would be in a respectable house, not this shrunken cave," she said.
Blaney removed a watch from the pocket of his woolen vest, and showed James the time.
They were leaving. Patrick watched his mother's face lose its color.
"You won't stay the night?" she asked.
"We start our work at just past four in the morning, mother. It's better we board now, catch a few hours sleep in the bunks."
"To be sure, to be sure," she said sadly.
Blaney pushed back from the table and stood up first, holding a tattered woolen cap in his hands. "Thank you kindly, Mrs. Waters."
James wrapped their mother in a powerful hug.
"If I'm to honor the Waters name, I shouldn't be sitting around this table now, should I?" James asked.
"Come down and watch her if you can," Blaney said to Patrick. "See that black smoke rushing out of the stacks and think of us."
His mother pressed James's hand. "You'll come back soon?"
"You won't even know we were gone," James said. "We'll be to America and back before the end of the month."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Dangerous Waters"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Gregory Mone.
Excerpted by permission of Roaring Brook Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS,
Title Page,
Dedication,
1. Saved by Cervantes,
2. Pride of Belfast,
3. A Very, Very Poor Idea,
4. Sir Francis Bacon's Secret,
5. City of Iron and Steel,
6. To Be Properly Dressed,
7. The Demigod of Spit,
8. Ravenous Mr. Rockwell,
9. Trouble in Baggage,
10. The Prize of the Hay Sale,
11. Plotting Amid Potatoes,
12. Merely a Book for Boys,
13. A Propensity for Toil,
14. Harry Widener's School for Ill-Informed Stewards,
15. Statesman, Scientist, Swindler,
16. Sir Robin's Proposal,
17. Unlikely Burglar,
18. The Many Faces of Mr. Rockwell,
19. Treasure Island's Hero,
20. The Knife Would Not Suffice,
21. An Inferior Creature,
22. Stealing from the Steam Room,
23. A Smoldering Book,
24. The Key to the Cipher,
25. The Incapable Academic,
26. Suddenly, Oddly Silent,
27. Swallowing Water Through the Bow,
28. No Interest in Icebergs,
29. A Noble Calling,
30. Help Will Come,
31. No Goodbyes,
32. Until Morning at Least,
33. His Great Treasure,
34. The Last of the Lifeboats,
35. Trapped in a Watery Vise,
36. An Unexpected Message,
Epilogue,
Author's Note,
Titanic Timeline,
Acknowledgments,
Copyright,