Honey Harlot (16 page)

I went to the deck rail and looked down. The yawl was hardly more than a rowing boat—was, in fact a rowing boat, but with a small sail aboard: no more than fourteen or fifteen feet long. Now the calm was ending, with the coming of evening a little breeze had blown up, the brig began to rock gently, the boat bobbed and jerked at her tether, I felt that even if I somehow forced myself to slither down the rope, I might fall between the ship’s hull and the edge of the boat; nor could I manage such a craft on my own, had no strength to row, no knowledge of sail, couldn’t even swim. Besides… To go off alone, escape alone from danger leaving all these others behind—leaving another woman behind… I stood looking out across the dark waters where now the swell began to break with the familiar little streaks of white foam as the waves fell back upon themselves. I prayed: ‘Into Thy hands, oh Lord, I commend my spirit!’ And I prayed that he, my husband, might not go from the jaws of hell that now closed about him, into a hell of all eternity; that the great God who had implanted within him passions beyond his control, would be merciful at the last. And I prayed for her too: ‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do…’

I stood a long time at the rail. I knew now that I must die; that surely we all must die. But death would be swift and merciful and I asked myself—poor little girl of eighteen years old—what I had to live for. What happiness had I to lose? All my life until now, I had been hectored and bullied for my stupidity, had lived in insecurity and fear; within the last days, I had found a new strength, a new recognition of what I might be that made up for other qualities I lacked—and in the past few hours had lost it all again: was reduced to a useless, unwanted thing that might come—but I thought would not be permitted to come—between those two. I said to God in my heart: ‘I have nothing to lose, nothing to regret. It’s only that I’m afraid.’ A little breeze blew against my face, blew aside the pale hair long ago torn from its decorous bands. It was as though God had put out His hand to me and softly caressed my cheek. I lifted up my head and said again the only prayer I prayed that night for myself: ‘Into Thy hands, oh Lord…’

And the breeze blew and, like a sleeping swan, the brig seemed to spread her feathers and settle in the water, comfortably rocking on the little waves that now again went slap, slap, slap against her wet sides. Darkness fell. The stars came out.

They came up again on deck—those two, dragging Richardson between them, and laid him down on the boards in the stern of the ship. ‘He’s exhausted. Sarah, fetch some water, see to him.’ As I crouched over him, they told me, speaking together like comrades occupied in the same task. ‘We can see it—dropped down among the barrels, far out of reach…’ And he: ‘God knows how long before the fire gets to the alcohol; once a keg is burned through… It will be an inferno.’ He also was exhausted: for a moment defeated. It was she who rallied him: ‘We must beat some sense into these fools.’

But you could not. They set about the task; I, obedient, relegated to dragging myself around fetching lanterns, lighting them; in face of their shoulder-to-shoulder companionship in an almost brazen gallantry, it seemed all I was fit to do. He bade me get water and some food for the yawl and, dully, I went about the task; but I thought that we should never reach her anyway, she with the rest would be blown to pieces when the ship went up. It was horrible below decks, all alone, creeping about in the narrow galley trying to sort out the best things to take: hagridden with the old, childhood knowledge that whatever I did would be wrong. The ship will go up, I thought, and I all alone down here… Or if she was not blown up but only caught fire… An inferno, he had said. Like a trapped rat, I scuttled this way and that, seizing up whatever I could find, wasting no more time in choice; and dragging a sack of provisions and two cans of water, I hauled myself up the companion steps and came back to the deck. They gave me only a brief glance. ‘Throw the sack down into the boat,’ he called out to me. ‘Keep the cans to be handed down.’ I threw the sack and it landed between the rocking boat and the hull of the brig. So should I land, I thought, if I tried to get down. I did not tell them that the provisions were gone; the sack floated, bobbing, crushed up between the two vessels and released again. Perhaps it would be reclaimable; but I was resigned now to the knowledge that it would never be needed.

Richardson seemed insensible, lying slackly on the deck. He had passed more time in the hold than the others and there were fumes down there, I supposed, that might overpower a man. My husband and Mary were trying to rally the crew but no sooner had they got one to his feet than he collapsed again back into torpidity. In jeering bravado, in violence or paralysed with fear at the terror which threatened them, they fended off all orders, all threats, all pleas. Mary said at last: ‘It’s all hopeless. And every minute’s too precious. We can’t risk it any longer. We must go without them.’

‘Yes, yes!’ he said, eagerly. He caught at her arm, hurried her to the rail, catching me by the hand also and dragging me with them. ‘Quick, down! I’ll steady the rope.’

‘I’ll follow after
you,’
she said.

He raged: ‘For God’s sake, you know I can’t go, I can’t leave my ship, I couldn’t leave these men, helpless

‘We can’t save them. We couldn’t get them down to the boat, she wouldn’t hold so many, anyway, not in this condition, out of their own control. And they’ve brought it on themselves.’

He did not say that it was
she
who had brought it upon them, inciting them to broach a barrel, deceiving them into the madness of drinking the stuff… ‘A Captain can’t leave his ship.’

‘Oh, nonsense to that! What’s some foolish tradition against your life and mine? For—’ She looked him steadily in the face, I never saw anyone so much unafraid, ‘if you die, I die too.’

He caught her up, flung her across the deck rail, straddling it. ‘Drop down into the boat! Get your hands to the rope and lower yourself down!’

She hung there, balanced, with only his handhold to save her. ‘If I go, it will be after
you.’

‘Go!’ he shouted. ‘Go! Go, or I’ll throw you down.’

They were strong those two; matching each other in strength. For a moment I thought he might really have done it, tumbling her into the little, rocking boat, risking whatever injury might come to her. But, straddled across the rail, she released her own hold of it, reached up with a swift movement and caught him by the hair. ‘If you will come with me, my Samson,’ she said, ‘you may throw me down.’

The terrible moments ticked by. I implored: ‘Time’s running out. We shall all be destroyed—’

She let go her grip on his hair, with a huge effort hauled herself up from the rail, threw her arms about his neck and fastened her mouth upon his; a moment later she had released her hold and, with a backward movement, deliberately missing the boat just below them, flung herself away from him, down, down, down, into the glittering dark water—and out of sight.

He waited only to tear off his jacket, then he leapt up, balanced a moment on the rail and dived in after her.

Terror for them gave me what fear for myself had not—strength to climb over the rail, catch at the rope and, clinging to it as it swayed sickeningly, bruising me against the side of the ship, somehow slither down it; with one free foot I kicked out till I found the prow of the boat, dragged it towards me, felt it beneath me and tumbled in. By the time I came there, her head was above water and she was moving towards me, one arm paddling, the other somehow holding him half out of the water. She gasped: ‘Help me! Help me!’

Did he, in falling, strike his head? Was there a push from above as he balanced for the dive? Did she herself…? I shall never know. He seemed, at any rate, hardly conscious as she dragged him to the side of the yawl furthest from the hull of the brig and gasped to me, spluttering: ‘Hold him! Try to lift him!’ I caught at him under the armpits but his weight was dragging me down after him, into the water; and I released my hold and kicking about blindly in the half-darkness, somehow wedged my foot beneath the board that ran across the beam, by way of a rowing seat, and so, straining over the side, got hold of him again and she, clinging to the gunwales of the boat with one hand, with the other lifted and pushed until at last we had him balanced on the rim and tumbling in a senseless heap across the seat. The yawl rocked and lurched, we shipped water, I hauled him to lie in the bottom and turned back to where she now clung with both hands to the gunwale. I jammed my foot again beneath the seat to give me purchase and, feeling that my arms must be wrenched out of their sockets, at last hauled her in after him. She fell across his body, gasping and spent; raised herself at last, looked down upon his face, so white now in the starlight, framed in the wet, dark hair; and took it between her hands and kissed the parted lips. I thought that it was as though Salome cradled in her arms the severed head of the Baptist.

I said: ‘You have killed him.’

‘I’ve saved him,’ she said. ‘How else could we have got him away from the ship?’

Aboard the brig, all was silence, but for raucous singing and a shout of loud laughter now and again as the men came out of their torpor, only, I suppose, to relapse again. ‘Cast off!’ she cried to me. ‘We must get free of the ship.’ And as I huddled, helpless, stupefied, she insisted, ‘The rope, tied to the forepeak there, unfasten the knot, leave the rope hanging, we must get away from the ship!’

I began stupidly to crawl forward. But some sense came back to me. ‘Richardson!’ I said. ‘He’s still up there on the deck, he’s helpless

‘And so are we,’ she said. ‘Helpless to do anything for him. Cast off, for God’s sake and let’s get away!’

‘Richardson’s done nothing. He’s been loyal all through. We can’t leave him

‘Will you climb back up the rope then,’ she cried to me, almost screaming, ‘and carry him down? We can do nothing for him, unknot the rope, you stupid little fool and let’s get away…!’ She had been stripping off her petticoats, standing rocking in the little, rocking boat, dabbling linen in sea-water, bathing his head where a little blood, I think, was flowing. Now she bundled up the lot, put the bundle beneath his head as a pillow and, frantically clambering over the intervening seats, past the mast which was lowered, lying along the body of the boat, she came to where I crouched, shoved me roughly aside and herself leaned over and Wrestled with the knot, made tight by immersion in the salt water; and while I still sat, sick with horror at the thought of getting ourselves clear away and leaving that good man lying insensible up there, she was back and had caught up an oar, fixed it into a rowlock, thrust me violently into position on the wooden seat and cried, ‘Row! Wait till I tell you and then row, we must row away from the ship, he told us to row away…’ As she flung herself down beside me, catching up an oar also, wrestling it into its rowlock, all in the half darkness, she flung at me: ‘At least you know how to row?’

A little. My brothers, impatient as ever with my ineptitudes, had taught me that much. Hunched, weeping, guilty, terrified, I took both hands to the oar and we slid away slowly and painfully forcing the heavy boat through the gently heaving waters, turning our heads fearfully to look back to where the brig rocked gently, ever further behind us.

After the terrible climb down the rope, the scramble into the boat, the effort of hauling him in, and her after him—my whole body seemed one exhausted mass of pain. My hands clutched at the hard round of the oar, too big for my fingers to hold it with comfort and strength; I could not get into rhythm with her strong even strokes, she turned and cursed me as the craft veered this way and that. Even after all she had been through, her spirit still rose indomitable: borne up, I could only suppose by her triumph in snatching him from the jaws of death… What he would say when he came to his senses and found the ship gone, and himself, alone out of all his men, safe—I dared not guess; nor what was to become of us, afloat on this limitless expanse of ocean. It was dark and cold; I shivered I think as much from the one as from the other.

She stopped rowing at last; leaning, even she, exhausted, across her oar. The ship still gently afloat was barely discernible—at least far enough out of danger’s way. She said, ‘Rest. Let the boat drift. No harm can come to us now,’ and went and knelt down by my husband’s side as he lay, motionless, his head kept out of the slopping of water, by her bunched-up petticoats. It seemed to both of us natural that she should go to him—not I; it almost appeared temerity in me to ask of another woman, about my own husband: ‘How does he seem?’

‘It’s nothing,’ she said. ‘A knock on the head: nothing serious. And thank goodness for it—he’d never have let us row him away.’

‘And rightly,’ I said. ‘With his men still in danger in the ship.’

‘We could do nothing to help them. What’s the point of all dying, when some may be saved?’

‘I feel sick to think of Richardson, lying there.’

‘He’ll know nothing. He’s like a man who dies in his sleep.’ She was groping about her in the darkness. ‘Is there something we could bale out this water with? I don’t like him lying in the wet.’

I said nothing. Found a can, kept there for the purpose, I suppose, and began dully to scrape up the water from the bottom of the boat and tip it back into the sea. She sat in her bedraggled dress, the wet skirts clinging to her without her petticoats to hold them stiffly out, and lifted his head into her lap, tenderly bathing his face and head with the torn linen, pushing back his black hair. I thought that she made a Rembrandt picture, curled up there with only his white face clear in the starlight and her bright hair, lit to gold. She was all the arts, Honey Mary, rolled into one: she was Beethoven, crashing with chords of thunder, she was Chopin so light and graceful, she was the charm and life and gaiety of a waltz by Strauss; she was Rembrandt in darkness and brilliance, she was Michelangelo in the firmness and strength of her beautiful body. And all poetry… La Belle Dame sans Merci, I thought; and I remembered the long, long poem of the Ancient Mariner and looked across at Honey Mary who had been so ever-sweet and saw her as in a broken mirror for what she was now—‘Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold; Her skin was white as leprosy, The nightmare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks men’s blood with cold…’
My
blood, I know, ran cold to see her crouched there, with my husband’s head in her arms and her lips against his forehead, cradling his head against her white breast; and the gold cross glittering which had brought us to so much ruin. The little boat heaved softly to and fro. When my task was done, I crept to the stern and huddled there and out of exhaustion, slept. No commotion came from the ship to awaken me. No explosion. No tongues of flame. We lay there till dawn, too worn out to know or care. With the dawn I woke and stirred, stiff with cold. She crouched there still, lying back against the side of the boat but with his head still in her lap. But she was awake. She said: ‘Well—you see?’