Honey Harlot (18 page)

‘You’re ill, sir,’ Richardson had said to him. ‘You’re not in your right mind.’ I think now that my husband
was
in his right mind, that this was his right mind and had been all along: that mind and body, his passions were violent and cruel and now at last were given rein: that out of his belief in a God of vengeance he had battened them down, but now had freed himself of those shackles and gloried in his violence.

And she also: whose childhood had been spent in the ever-present threat of violence which, in her perverted passion for her own father, she craved: and now found in a substitute, a man perhaps not much less than her father’s age when first those sick longings had been aroused in her. She gave the boy no glance of compassion, came, stepping so delicately in her pink dress, honey hair shining, to my husband’s side. They stood there—a splendid and a terrible pair: he dark, saturnine, black-eyed, black-haired with the short, jutting beard—she with her beautiful body and her beautiful face, with the tumble of dark gold curls and the bright gold cross at her throat.

Martens came up from the fore deckhouse, his arm in a sling. My husband called to him sharply. ‘Where have you been?’

‘I voss lyink on de bunk, sir, to recover.’

‘To recover from what? A flesh wound in your arm? You contributed to this filth. Get down on your knees and help to clear it up.’

‘Yessir,’ said the man. He hesitated. ‘De men is askink—what now, sir?’

‘Now you work like galley slaves, having reduced your number and your strength by your own wicked folly, to help bring the ship eight hundred miles more, to land. And there you go to gaol for mutiny.’

Gilling’s body still lay where it had fallen. There was not strength among them all, to lift the dead weight of it and I, sickened and horrified, was nevertheless too much occupied in my task of saving the yet living, to care too much about the pitiful dead. Now Martens glanced towards it. He said: ‘You killed him—’

‘He attacked me,’ said my husband. ‘As you did also. You attacked your Captain with weapons.’

‘Our Captain had deserted his ship,’ the man said, sullenly; but regretted his temerity immediately and slunk away back to where the men mopped and scrubbed, and with his one good arm made a feeble attempt to work also. Mary said, low-voiced: ‘If they talk like that ashore—that could be dangerous.’

‘They attacked their Captain,’ he said briefly.

‘You see what they’ll say—that you had deserted them. You weren’t fitted to lead them any longer. That’ll be their story.’

‘I shall have a story to answer it,’ he said.

I stood up. My childhood. I suppose, rose up in me then—that strict, deeply religious upbringing and the lessons I had learned at the knee of a straight, stern, narrow and godly man—of rightness and wrong, of truth and untruth, of heaven and hell. If my husband lived on with no penance on this earth for his sins, he would die condemned to hell for all eternity. I said: ‘I shall have a story also. I shall tell all the truth.’

They turned upon me looks of blank astonishment. Mary said: ‘You would condemn him to death!’

‘Better to die in repentance than live with the wickedness that’s in him now.’

‘For God’s sake!’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t do this?’

‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘I would. And for his sake, to save him from God’s wrath.’

He stood absolutely silent, staring at me with those black eyes of his; and in his face I could read nothing. But she—she came at me, running at me across the deck, leaping over the outflung arm of the dead body lying there; and in a moment I think would have had me by the throat. But he came after her and pulled her off me. ‘Let me be!’ she screamed. ‘Let me kill her! Dead men tell no tales. With her out of the way…’

But he pulled her away and she fell into his arms and laid her golden head against his breast and broke into a terrible sobbing. ‘She’ll not harm you, she shan’t harm you,’ she cried, choking it out, clinging to his sleeves with clenched white hands. ‘Get her out of the way!—what is she but a thing of milk and water, a miserable, half-witted creature, with her cringing little soul…’ With all her magnificent physique, she was as exhausted as the rest, I suppose, by the night we had passed through and the events of that morning. He held her close in his arms, no pretences now, and she lay there and sobbed out her weary heart. I thought to myself for a moment that after all, I was the strong one now.

With bleary eyes, driving themselves into what activity they might, the men looked incredulously on.

I left them to stand there, he hushing and soothing her, and turned back to Richardson. He caught me by the hand. He pulled me close. I think all events remote from himself were now beyond his recognition. He mumbled, so that I must bend my head close to his to hear him: ‘My wife …A letter

‘You have no strength,’ I said. ‘Give me messages…’

But he only muttered and mumbled, ‘A letter… A letter…’ ‘I’ll write for you,’ I said. ‘Be patient a moment.’ I went down to the cabin, ignoring those other two, and came back with a slate and slate pencil. ‘I’ll write a message, Albert, a letter, and copy it afterwards and you shall see it. And when you are well—’

‘Write, write,’ he muttered urgently. He began to whisper it out. I wrote on the slate. ‘Fanny, my dear wife…’ and waited. He said no more and I saw that he was dead.

I
SAT FOR A
long time by Richardson’s side, holding his dead hand in mine. I remembered how I had thought of him once—how long ago it seemed!—as a sort of angel, an angel of goodness, Gabriel, sword in hand, fighting off my terrors, drawing me into an aura of warmth and light that shone about him. How I had dreamed of how it might have been, had my husband been such as he: understanding and kind… It seemed a long time indeed since I had been half a child still, a woman only in a new knowledge and dread of the world—dreaming such foolish dreams. Richardson had been no angel: Honey Mary could have testified to that. But he had been kind and true, loyal to his Master; and might have been to me a friend. As I had thought once that I had no friend in the world but a waterside whore—now I knew that there had been one other; and they both were gone.

The men’s work was half done, they were approaching the stern of the vessel. My husband stood with Mary, earnestly talking there. He seemed to come to a decision. He strode forward, looking down on the four of them as they crept slowly forward on hands and knees, scrubbing brushes moving almost automatically up and down the fouled boards of the deck; looking up at Boz Lorenzen on the poop deck. ‘Very well. You may all rest now. I’ll take over the wheel. Get down to your quarters, let the boy find you something to eat.’ But as Head stumbled to his feet and, with reddened eyes, now running with pus, began to fumble his way forrard, hands touching the sides of the raised roof of the fore deckhouse to guide himself, he amended, shrugging. ‘Or if he can’t, then another of you see to it.’ They lurched off, a scarecrow crew, supporting one another; one heard the crash and bump as they tumbled down the companion steps. He strode up to the poop deck, caught up a rope and lashed the wheel and came striding back down again. Mary had waited for him. They came and stood over me as I sat at Richardson’s side. Mary said, ‘He’s dead?’

‘Dead,’ I said. ‘And murdered.’

My husband said: ‘He shall have burial.’

I said sadly: ‘Who is left, fit to say prayers over him?’

Mary made an impatient movement. My husband said quietly: ‘Stand up, Sarah. It’s necessary that we talk about this.’ I clambered up with a hand on the deck rail, stiff with cold and weariness, and confronted them. ‘What is there to say?’

‘The men mustn’t see him, Sarah,’ said Mary. ‘There will be worse trouble if they know that he’s gone.’

‘The men not know that he’s killed?’

‘While they’re below, we’ll pretend to have taken him down to the saloon, to be nursing him in his own cabin there. No secret that he’s wounded; they all know that. But we daren’t let them know that he’s dead.’

‘Take him—? But you can’t keep him dead, down there in the cabin

‘I said we
must pretend
,’ said Mary. But they spoke carefully now, placatingly, they were trying to nurse me into complacency—into complicity. My husband said: ‘I said he must have burial, Sarah. Every sailor faces burial at sea.’

‘But how can we keep such a burial from the men?’

‘Oh, Sarah!’ said Mary, losing her careful patience. ‘There’s no
time
for formalities, for wrappings up in canvas—’

I cried out to my husband: ‘You won’t simply throw him into the sea?’

‘He shall have prayers,’ he said. He glanced over his shoulder as though fearful that at any moment the men might come staggering back and catch them at their work. ‘Come, Sarah, what else matters? He’s dead, what does he care now for ceremonial?’ He caught me by the arm, pulled me to kneel down with him over the poor, blood-stained body. ‘Pray with me, pray the prayers for the soul departed—’

‘I’ll pray for the soul departed,’ I said savagely, ‘and it will be pours. For I think it’s no longer in your own keeping.’

He only said, rather wearily: ‘I’m fighting now for our lives.’

‘And our lives are in danger already and far more so if we spend more time arguing over this,’ said Mary. ‘Say your prayers, for God’s sake, for whom or what you will; and drop him over the side.’

I knelt close to him, bitterly weeping. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said to his poor, dead, upturned face, ‘I’m so sorry.’ What did it matter to him, they had said, now that he was dead; but to bundle him over the side like a load of jettisoned ballast… ‘No one shall pray for you,’ I said to his dead face, ‘except myself. You shall not be—desecrated—by the Godless prayers of your murderer.’ And I bent and kissed his forehead and commended his soul to God and made him a promise that never was to be kept. Your Frances shall have your last message. She shall know you died thinking of her.’ I got up and stood aside, turning away my lead, the tears flowing down my face. My husband said briefly: Can you bear it?’ and without a word she stooped and lifted the limp, sprawled legs and my husband I suppose took the shoulders, for I would not watch; and grunting with the struggle, they lifted him to the level of the rail; and there was a splash, and silence.

I think they were not unaffected by the doing of it; they were silent, standing with dropped hands and hanging heads. She rallied first. She said: ‘I daresay that for this other, we had better do it all in style?’

‘It will keep their minds occupied,’ he said.

She put her hand to where the blue bruise showed through the dark hair, fallen forward over his dark face with the effort and the strain. She said: ‘Won’t you eat something now and rest a little? I’ll fetch food from the galley?’

The sun was high in the heaven now, the cold winter sun that seemed to do nothing to alleviate the chill that went through to the very marrow of one’s bones. He said: ‘We should all three rest and try to eat. Some coffee…?’ She turned and went forward, swinging her way down the new washed decks with a swish of her frilly pink skirts, tapping her way on the heels of her little pink boots. She who had been so insouciant and gay in life and love, was insouciant also it seemed in the face of death. I stood at the rail and watched in horror as the body rose up through the splash of its falling, and drifted slowly astern. He took me by the arm and half dragged me down the companion-way and to the door of my cabin. ‘Go in, Sarah,’ he said, ‘and clean yourself and tidy yourself. It’s easier to face life when one’s under one’s own command.’

‘Are
you
under your own command?’ I said.

‘Oh, dear God!’ He closed his eyes as though he could bear no more reproach from me, no more harping on a theme that now he felt unable to contemplate. He made no answer. I went into my cabin and closed the door.

I poured water and washed what was left of poor Richardson’s blood from my hands; washed my face and my body, moving stiffly from the long exposure to the cold; rinsed the salt water from my hair and combed it out to dry; put on clean underlinen. Mary called at the door and I went to it and took in a mug of coffee; she had put a lot of sugar in it which I think was wise. My mirror was opposite me as I stood drinking and I stared with something like stupefaction into the face that looked back into mine. Deathly white with the long strands of hair, darkened with the wetness to a heavy auburn, hanging all about my shoulders; eyes like two holes burnt into the white, smudged round with deep shadows. My arms and hands were bruised, fingers blistered with the effort of rowing, nails rough and broken. But what was all that? I stood there, staring back at myself: a girl, a young girl, whose worst experience in my whole life till now, had been the cringing terror of some small social event where everyone would be more clever, talented, and assured than I. And now… The husband into whose care I had been surrendered for the rest of my life to come, was translated to a monster, half mad with passion for a waterfront harlot; cruel, brutal, twice over a murderer. Two men were dead, four were half crazed with the effects of crude alcohol and in the saner parts of their minds, doubtless plotting to murder us all—to kill him before he should kill
them:
to kill us two women who might inform against them. A monstrous deception was being practised against them, in the concealment of Richardson’s death; and with it all, if no more harm should come—what next? The Captain would have his tale to tell: of the smuggling of the woman aboard—how would they two contrive that story alone, and somehow conceal their mutual passion so that anyone might believe it?—the broaching of the alcohol: the men, driven out of their senses, attacking their Captain, the chief mate Richardson included; the acts of self-defence… Denial of the story that the men would recount, of their master’s desertion of his ship; (so incapacitated had they been, indeed, that none would have observed the circumstances of its coming about and doubtless they all believed that their Captain had indeed committed the unforgivable sin). Only one obstacle to be dealt with then—once he had, with the aid of a blinded boy and four half mad and bitterly belligerent German seamen, somehow brought his brigantine eight hundred miles to landfall in Portugal—only one obstacle. A young girl who stood strong as a rod of silver in her knowledge of her duty: her duty to God, her duty to the truth, her duty to the salvation of her husband’s soul.