Honey Harlot (20 page)

I rushed down to the cabin, to the chart pinned on the saloon wall; consulted the slate, worked out our position—and it was true: the island of Santa Maria, at the easternmost point of the Azores. I rushed up on deck again; ran to the galley in the fore deckhouse. Mary was there, filling canvas bags with biscuits, cooked meats, dried fruit. She said only, ‘Fill those cans with fresh water,’ and staggered away up on deck with her load. When I came up with my water cans, the men were still standing, huddled together; she had been down and dumped the stuff and was scaling the swaying ladder like a monkey, easily, hand over hand; only she had kicked off the little pink boots and went barefoot. I put down the cans and ran back for warm clothes and bedding. Now they were climbing down the ladder, still with the gun trained upon them, the brothers assisting the boy with his bandaged eyes as, whimpering, he clung with unsteady hands, feeling about with his foot for the rung below; Boz returning to assist Martens with his wounded arm. They settled themselves, the Lorenzens at the oars, and within a couple of minutes were rowing away from the brig and out of gunshot range.

It seemed all very—strange. I went down again to the saloon. Santa Maria, easternmost island in the group of the Azores. I took down a book from the shelf above the charts and turned up the page. Santa Maria…

I went back to them as they stood at the rail watching the yawl which seemed moving only very slowly away from us. I said: ‘You have murdered them.’

‘They have only six miles,’ said Mary.

I held out the book. ‘Santa Maria. Nothing but solid, jagged rock, precipitous rock cliffs… It says at the bottom: “Any landing, impossible.”’

‘It lifted the fear from their hearts,’ said Mary. ‘We’re in the trade routes.’ Her eyes consulted my husband. ‘They’ll be picked up eventually. They’re well victualled.’

That I couldn’t deny; it had surprised me a little that she should supply them so well for a journey of only six miles, for which they had two men at least, able to row; and a sail—though in so little wind, that would be not much use.

‘But what if they’re not picked up?’

Mary said, shrugging: ‘Dead men tell no tales.’

‘Dead men—’

‘They will be picked up. They’ve got food and warm things. Come, let’s go to the galley and get something for the three of us…’

‘There
is
no “three of us”,’ I said. ‘There’s you two—and me. You two get food and eat. I’ll stay by myself.’

She said impatiently: ‘Come down to the galley, I say!’ and glanced at my husband, I thought uneasily. ‘Tell the silly little fool to behave herself,’ she said.

‘Yes, go now—’ But he stopped and cried out suddenly: ‘What’s happening?’ and pointed out to sea.

The men were standing up in the boat—floundering about, tipping her dangerously this way and that. One of them stripped off his coat and dived overboard, clinging to the gunwales. My husband said, staring: ‘Why’s he done that?’ and then, ‘To lighten her? What’s wrong with her?’ I said: ‘Dear God!’—she’s sinking.’

She was sinking. We could hear, faintly, their cries, the boy’s high voice screaming out in terror as, blinded, he stumbled about in the boat as she settled lower and lower in the water. He could find no purchase anywhere, tripped over one of the seats, I suppose, and went sprawling. The others were trying to haul him to his feet, I could discern his movements and thought that he tried to tear the bandages aside from his eyes. Through the gathering dark, we could see that one man, Volkert Lorenzen, I suppose, or Goodschaad, since he used both arms, was waving to us wildly; across the waters his voice came dimly, hollering for help. But even as he stood there rocking, the boy stumbled once more and pitched over the side. I screamed out. I cried, ‘She’s sinking, what can be done?’ and my husband also said, ‘She’s going! They’ll drown. What can we do?’

Mary said coolly: ‘Let them swim.’

Who ever knew a sailor that could swim? ‘They can’t swim,’ I cried. ‘And where can they swim to? They couldn’t make it back so far as this.’

That blackness again, that almost mist of horror! I seized my husband’s arm. ‘They’re injured… The boy can’t see. And Marten’s arm!’ And I cried out again in horror, ‘They’ll drown! They’ll drown!’

‘Let them drown,’ said Mary. ‘Dead men tell no tales.’

I think then that my husband did glance at her with a look of something like terror. He was trying to kick off his deck shoes, wrenching off his heavy jacket. She clung to him, impeding him. ‘For God’s sake—what are you going to do?’

‘Swim out to them,’ he said.

Now it was her turn to cry out in fear, imploring him. ‘You’ll never swim so far! And if you get to them… What can you do for them?—you can’t help them, men floundering, one sick and two of them injured.’ And as he persisted in his efforts to get his arms out of the jacket, she clinging to him, she repeated, hammering with her small hard fist at his shoulder as though to drive through the message into his very flesh, ‘Let them drown! Without them, we’re safe.’ And again, ‘Dead men tell no tales.’

Sick, haggard, he looked back into her upturned, imploring face. ‘Oh, Mary—’ he said. Was it a question that he asked of her then? Was it a horrified repudiation of what the answer to that question might be? In this matter, at least, I think that my husband was innocent. At any rate, as she clung, impeding him, he thrust her aside, violently, so that she almost toppled back away from him, and fell sprawling on the deck. ‘I had better try at any rate,’ he said, stooping to peel off his deck shoes, and to me, ‘Include this at least when to save your precious soul, you tell your murderous truths,’ and he leapt to the deck rail and balancing there for a moment, dived into the sea and began to swim strongly out to the boat. She had staggered to her feet a moment too late to stop him; and now at once tore off the pink dress and the froth of white petticoats below and, in her white frilled knickers and bodice, dived in after him.

Impotent, frightened, foolish, I clung to the rail staring after them into the darkening evening, her white arms flashing up out of the water as with strong overarm strokes—and she a woman—she cut through the swirling dark green of the wave-less sea. When I raised my eyes again to the boat, I saw that it was turned turtle, bottom up. I think now that the two brothers took on each one of the injured men: one trying to support the blinded boy who threshed about horribly screaming, the other supporting Martens with his one helpless arm. Since none could swim, quite simply they died together, two pairs, the helpless dragging down those who might possibly have paddled themselves afloat or with arms free, clung to the upturned boat. As it was—by the time my husband came there, exhausted no doubt by the long swim through the icy water—the men were gone. I saw that he swam about the boat, as though searching; turned, hopeless, and swam back to Mary lest she needed his aid. But not she!—I saw that he merely turned and swam alongside her till they came to the yawl and clung there, spent but safe.

The grey mist, the blackness; I was falling, falling… All gone, all dead—seven of them who but a matter of hours ago had been fine, strong, decent men—all gone. Women to mourn who would never know their fate: would be taught to believe that they had died in the course of wrong-doing, of violence and mutiny; children left fatherless whose names would bear always that stigma of shame. That a man in port, after long voyage or before, should relieve his man’s passions in the body of a paid woman, need not mean that he could not love and cherish his own and be loved and cherished in return. Richardson with his Frances—Volkert Lorenzen with a wife and three children, Boz leaving a child in two senses fatherless… Gilling I knew had no wife or children, but was yet a mother’s son. Even poor Head, though we treated him as a boy and referred to him seldom by any other name, was in fact twenty-three years of age and just before sailing had found some young girl, foolish enough (one must admit) to marry him. He would boast of it among the men but they hardly believed it, teasing him about his pretended married state; but I think it was true. Of Martens I knew nothing nor of Goodschaad; but all sailors acquire wives in one port or another and go back between voyages to ‘home’. Now there were seven who would never go home again. I wished that I too might die: what home had I now? And I thought it would not be long. By this last stroke of what I supposed they would call their luck, my husband and his woman were freed of the last threat to their safety—except for me. I thought it was true that he wouldn’t harm me. Somewhere perhaps, in the deeps of his consciousness, at the back of his soul, was the unrecognised hope that in me at last lay his salvation; that if he could not save himself, I would. But she… She was strong and lithe and all my small spirit was ebbing away out of me. Some story to be told him of my losing my will to live—and a lift and a twist… And all about us, the shark dark waters, the shark dark depths beneath the glassy green sea where seven men now floated, a hideous bait. She will kill me, I thought and wondered if, the work done for him, he would wash his hands of my blood. ‘The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she…’

The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she, who thicks men’s blood with cold. Would she spare my blood who had spilt so much and exulted in it as though she were indeed the tigress, who had tasted the flesh of man? There seemed a madness upon her; I think that in those last terrible days they were both unsound in their minds, driven on by some horror long hidden within them, and now released, acting each upon the other—she craving his mastery as, sick, she had craved the illicit mastery of her own father; he crazed with the release of tendencies natural to him, kept too long under his own subjection. Separate, they might have survived; together it was as though the alcohol in the hold had indeed been ignited by a lighted fuse and inferno reigned. She will kill me, I thought, whether he wills it or no.

When I came to, it was almost dark and he was climbing up the rope ladder, back to the deck. Somehow they had pushed and paddled the heavy boat back to the brig and tethered her to her mooring close to the stern. He gasped out, ‘A lantern!’ and I struggled up and fetched one and lit it, and he went down the ladder again to assist her up. As he held the lamp above his head to allow her to clamber from the hull of the yawl to the ladder, it fell upon the upturned bottom of the boat.

Their luck, did I say? I recalled how she had gone down first with the bags of food, while I still worked in the galley and my husband stood guard over the men… When she came to the rail and, exhausted, tumbled over and stood clinging to it, a ghost in the darkness, wet under-clothes clinging close to her body, dank hair all about the pale, beautiful face, I confronted her, speechless. She made no denial of the unspoken accusation. She said simply, yet once again, ‘Dead men tell no tales.’

I
THINK THAT FOR
some days after this, I was very ill. I know that I stumbled down to the saloon, went into Richardson’s cabin and, not caring who had slept there before me and with whom—fell on the bunk, dragged up the covers over me and there lay huddled till sleep came to me at last. When I awoke, I knew that I had a fever. The long night in the yawl had chilled me through to my bones, I had not changed my clothes when I got back to the ship but stayed up on deck with Richardson. I had drunk a little coffee, eaten practically nothing; lived in a condition of perpetual terror and shock. Now I was burning hot and heavily perspiring, yet shivering as though I were cold. I dragged myself through to the main cabin, regardless of its present occupation, tried, unsteadily standing at the wash-table, to sluice myself down with cold water. The calm was evidently over, the winds had meanwhile freshened, the ship was in motion. I cared for nothing; drank some water from the ewer, dropped the damp towels to the floor and feeling my way along the walls and through the sliding doorway, fell back on to the bunk in Richardson’s cupboard-room.

Later I knew that Mary came to me. I opened dull eyes and saw her face bending over me but I was dead to all caring. She went away, brought water and cloths, bathed my face and hands and sweating body—I recognised dimly that I wore a nightgown now and no longer the clothes in which I had thrown myself down; so she must have been with me before. Deft, strong, ever capable, she moved me to one end of the bed so that she might draw out the soaking sheet and replace it, put new covers on the pillows, laid me down and covered me with a clean sheet and packed me in with blankets. She had brought fresh water with her, very cold, and I drank at it thirstily and fell back again. All the while she murmured half endearments, ‘Poor Sarah! Poor girl! There now, lie comfortably!’ but no words passed between us. I think I could hardly have spoken to be understood, and indeed hardly knew where I was nor what had happened to bring me there. She left me and I dozed off, and woke again and dozed again… Many times I know that she returned, bringing me fresh water, trying to tempt me to eat. No conversation passed between us: none—only those murmured kindnesses, the tenderest attention, the most scrupulous care. As I came slowly back to health, the thought came to me that if there had been a time to kill me, surely it would have been now; but nothing was spared that would bring me back to life.

How they had managed, those two, meanwhile, I shall never know—somehow to haul up the yawl which now hung perilously, lashed to the deck rail at the stern of the ship; whatever damage she had done to it had been repaired, while, I suppose, the calm still lasted. Now we were under way, the light wind bellying out the sails which had been all set and so must surely remain until it became imperative to bring them down—for surely she was at least not fit to go up into the rigging, work that daunts many a trained seaman when conditions become tricky. He had taught her to understand the steering and she now stood her trick like any man—though indeed I suppose much of all this had been familiar to her already, she had lived all her life among sailors and had in her a tomboy spirit which would lead her to enquire and attempt; under a less conscientious Captain, I daresay, and in lesser ships, she may well have been to sea before. At any rate, she appeared now to have taken to the life as though she had lived all her days under sail, and together in perfect harmony, they worked side by side like two companionable men. Time could be spared, however, for passionate embraces, which they made no attempt to conceal; I think that by now they could not touch one another without the wild blood surging through their veins, nor forbear to touch one another every time they came close. Sick, sick—they were sick with their passion, lost in it, devoured by it. Since only they two could share the watches, through the nights I supposed they must be divided; unless he would go above and take her on the floor of the poop deck, close by the wheel; it was on the bare boards, after all, that he had first known her, ‘not waiting to come to the bed.’ Tiger—tigress: two beasts of the wild, untamed, uninhibited. Tiger—tigress—burning bright, In the forests of the night. By night and by day too, they burned with a fierce fire. I suppose they called it love.