Honey Harlot (22 page)

‘Then we must admit to my identity, of course,’ said Mary, ‘and say simply that the crew smuggled me aboard, he knowing nothing of it. In that surely you can agree, give evidence? You know it to be true.’

‘But will
they
believe it to be true?’

‘Of course. No one knows except Morehouse, he swore he’d tell nobody. Who else would dream of Captain Benjamin Briggs agreeing to such an arrangement?—and he with a new wife of his own, and carrying her aboard. Then, we can borrow men from her crew, get the brig to the nearest port in Portugal, and in due course I’ll ship back to New York; and there tell the same story.’

‘And you and I, Sarah, shall be man and wife again—’

‘God forbid!’ I said.

He said patiently: ‘Shall at any rate live outwardly as man and wife. In time, if your hatred for me is so great, you may make some excuse I suppose, to return to your family; suffering from sickness, for that or any reason unable to endure the life at sea—I can visit you there between voyages and keep up some pretence…’

I am a figurehead. I am a wooden thing, with the salt seas dashing up, soaking me, drowning me in the old hopelessness, the old helplessness, stupid, vague Sarah, inept and unaware, pushed this way and that by the forceful and capable; with no love to call my own. Torn from the endless small scratches and bruisings of the childhood home, flung among forces too violent for any spirit to endure—and I am again to return to the nest of thorns, with the added stigma of the first and only great adventure failed. I who had looked to love, have found no one to love. I am a figurehead with a heart of wood…

I crept away from them and down to my cabin—to Richardson’s cabin, he who had been kind, who for a moment of dreaming had been like the Archangel Gabriel to me; who had said, ‘You are so sweet,’ before he died. I knelt at my bedside and before it was too late, I prayed—I prayed. ‘Let me not fall back into a dreaming girl. Thou who hast supported me so far in a new spirit and a new strength and a new understanding—put down Thy golden hand, hold me, guide me: let me not fall back into helplessness, into that dreaming girl with no mind and no heart and—dear God!—no soul, of her own. Let me not become once more a lifeless figurehead…’

All the next days, I wrestled with the spirit of that prayer: I fought for identity, I fought for courage, I fought for my own soul so that in the days to come I might fight for my husband’s soul. I had sworn to love him. If I could not love him with my heart, then it no less behoved me to love him as a soul that must be given back to God. As such I have prayed, in this narrow place, for him ever since: before this crucifix.

They spoke to me no more of their plans. I think that, since I made no violent denial as I always had before, they believed that I acquiesced. But at any rate there was no time now for further conversation. He saw that bad weather was coming and that somehow, somehow, he must contrive less sail. Two of the sails had been blown right away by now, one was hanging loose. The great sail at the stern of the vessel, the stay sail, I think—he said by some means must be got down. In the rising wind, the ship tossing and pitching, the waves beginning already to dash up, spraying up over the decks, we worked, we toiled, the three of us, all differences forgotten: I doing the least of the work, of course, but darting to orders, dressed up myself, now, in seaman’s clothes—what could one do in thick, fluttering skirts and petticoats? No question of climbing the rigging, lowering carefully, reefing, whatever real seamen might have done. In a haze of ignorance I pulled on a rope when I was told to, wound up, unwound, slackened, released, hauled up again… Until at last, with a huge, rattling, rustling, crashing thud, down she came and lay in great heaped folds sweeping down to the top of the main deckhouse, astern. The brig slackened in her headlong thrust through the water but still sped on, the spume thrusting up and over her bows, the waves now sweeping through the open rails and across the decks, pouring down through any orifice left uncovered. I fled to the cabins and closed and boarded up such windows as I could, but even as I worked a wave would break over the height of the sill to the companion-way and water come pouring down into the saloon. I struggled to the galley, the waves washing over my feet as I ploughed my way along the deck, now climbing uphill, now thrown into a downwards running trot as she pitched and tossed. Down there, I secured all I could, packed food high that might come to harm with the water rising already to my ankles. Above decks, I know that they struggled, those two, with what strength and courage!—forcing obedience from a ship which, with her sails all askew, was now like a wilful horse that finds its reins broken and feels its head. All that evening we battled; but at last the wind dropped and by nightfall she was once more under such control as she would ever be. We changed from our sodden clothing, into something warm and dry; I had brought from the galley food and hot drinks. Exhausted we sat at the table and ate and drank. He had lashed the wheel but now he said, wearily, ‘I must get back to the poop deck again.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ she said.

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘You must rest. At some time or other I shall be forced to get some sleep and then it’ll be your turn. You’ll be of no use unless you’re rested.’ Except that he gave no actual order, he might have been speaking to his chief mate; even in my condition of total exhaustion I had a flash of wry humour as I told myself that so, indeed, he was. ‘You too, Sarah,’ he said. ‘To your cabin! You look fit to drop.’

‘She’s done great work,’ said Mary.

‘You’ve both been magnificent. We might well have been lost. Now rest,’ he said and dragged himself up to his feet and staggered off up the companion. She called out: ‘I shall relieve you at four bells.’ Four bells, six bells, eight bells—I don’t know. The bell tells the passing of the watch; I never came to understand it, only that the constant clang of clapper against iron had oppressed my nerves in the days when regular watches had been kept. She went up at any rate some time during the night, I suppose; no use my offering, I couldn’t understand the binnacle, compass, whatever it was they must read and follow; nor indeed could I hang on with sufficient strength, to the great spokes of the wheel. But she… Well, yes—she was magnificent.

I slept heavily. By daylight the wind had lowered but it was very dark and heavily raining. I washed and dressed; Mary had returned from whatever watch she had kept and was washed and dressed also, though both of us still in loose wrappers over our drawers and bodices. She said: ‘You’d better light the stove in the galley and get us some breakfast,’ and at that moment my husband’s voice cried out on a note of wild exultation, ‘A ship!’

Faintly, faintly to be discerned in the distance—to me no more than a smudge, seen dimly through the darkness and rain. But my husband cried out, ‘My glass! Fetch me my glass!’ and I ran down to the cabin and came back with it. He put it to his eye and for a long time steadily watched the approaching vessel. Then he lowered the glass slowly. Now his hands shook and his face was that ashen grey. Gone was all the huge power and ruthlessness, all the half mad brutality that had brought us to this hour. He said: ‘The ship is the Dei Gratia.’

The Dei Gratia. With Captain Morehouse aboard, the only man left in the world who knew that Mary Sellers had been my husband’s woman, back in New York; the only man in the world who would cast doubt upon any story they had planned to tell.

C
OULD HE EVER IN
fact have cast real doubt upon the story?—so that it be absolutely disbelieved and my husband suffer the consequence of crimes which surely could not have been proved in any court of law? At any rate, they made no attempt whatsoever to consider it; and indeed I think that in that moment my husband’s mind positively and finally gave way—that hard, narrow, bigoted mind that had received its first disintegrating shock when he came to himself and found himself—the great, the feared, the respected Captain Benjamin Briggs—tumbling on the floor of a waterfront brothel with a waterfront whore in his arms. He looked down now into her face and I think that he saw Death there—she had been to him through these days of advancing madness his Death-in-Life, his Life-in-Death… ‘Her skin was white as leprosy’—but
her
skin was golden and warm; she had thicked his blood not with cold but with the warmth of her woman’s body, with the warmth of her golden arms circled about his neck, with the white heat of her perverted love. He cried out: ‘To the yawl! Lower the yawl!’ and rushed to where the boat hung in the stern of the ship. She followed him. ‘Get food!’ she screamed to me,’—and water, and warm clothes!’ I was too much bemused to do more than stumble forrard as I had before, and, as I had before, collect provisions and fill cans with fresh water and stagger back with them to where they wrestled with ropes and cleats, winches, whatever it may all be called—crazily lowering the heavy boat down to the water. It tilted this way and that and at last with a violent splash landed right side up. The rope ladder was not there, they spent no time searching for it; he cut wildly at a lanyard and tying it to the rail, dropped it over the side. No time given for protest, I followed him down and she after me. The rope had been so tied that a flick would release it; there should be no sign that the boat had been boarded that way. Without a word they took each an oar and began with smooth strokes to pull away from the ship, as on a night that seemed an aeon of hells ago, she and I also had done. We could see dimly that the Dei Gratia slackened speed, changed course, was making for the abandoned brig; but by that time we were a speck in the heaving ocean, with the Mary Celeste between us and them. They spoke not a word, each with two hands to an oar steadily pulling further and further away.

How long before they rested?—hanging, exhausted, across their oars, he no less spent than she. She gasped out at last, ‘Dare we hoist sail?’

‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘Not yet. In a little while, we’ll row again; but by now I think we must at least be out of sight—unless they begin raking about with a glass. And even then… Thank God for the rain, it’s like a curtain! Still, I think that a sail might be unwise for a little while yet.’

‘And anyway, they’ll be too much taken aback by what they find?’ She still had the forethought to suggest, ‘But if they do see us—?’

‘We must tell the same story as before. But… We can say that after last night’s storm, we could no longer control the ship. We thought she was sinking—’

‘You say there’s three foot or more of water in the hold,’ said Mary. ‘And there’s water in the lazaretto, I know.’ The lazaretto was, I think, where the spare gear was kept stowed. She herself had hauled the top off and I suppose never got it back on again, or only partially.

‘The water won’t convince them,’ he said. ‘They’ll see that I’d sounded the pumps. No one would believe that with all my experience, I’d think there was danger in a few feet of water here and there.’

‘If it got among the barrels—?’

‘It could do no harm. No danger to the ship, no reason for leaving her.’

‘One of the barrels stove in,’ said Mary. ‘They might believe you’d been afraid of some—explosion?’

‘We went into all that,’ he said impatiently, ‘when we made up the tale about the pirates. No man of my experience would be anxious about the cargo. All’s well with it, I’d know too well how to manage it.’

‘If they found the fuse,’ I suggested, ‘even unlit—’

‘He went in and got it,’ said Mary. ‘Knowing it was harmless and given time, he could get to it. We were afraid of what people might think, if it were observed there, in the unloading.’ She said wretchedly at last, ‘Perhaps we’d have done better after all, to stay with the ship?’

He sat on the board that stretched across the beam of the yawl, forming a seat, his elbows on his spread knees, his head in his hands. ‘I must have been mad,’ he said.

A strange, strange confabulation, the three of us, huddling there. The rain poured down, streaming off our oilskins, plopping into the puddle of water already forming in the bottom, and yet we must welcome it as a veil to hide us from the sight of man. On the heaving water, the little boat tossed and rolled, idling with the cessation of their rowing. We were going—whither? We were going—why?—going how? For mile upon mile about us under the teeming rain, the silent green heaving of the dark sea with its white hands slap-slap-slapping against the frail sides of our cockle-shell craft, the white spume spraying as wave mounted upon wave and fell back again and away…

A cockle-shell she was, tossing alone on the vast green waters of the ocean; but heavy enough to handle, by a man and two women. She was perhaps eighteen foot long, seven or eight at her widest part, in the centre. She narrowed again towards the stern and then was squared off. There were four or five boards across her for rowing—the thwarts, are they called?—and a wide seat in the stern. Here the rudder hung outboard with a—what?—a stick, a handle, a steering yoke I vaguely recall, something like that, and surely I should remember for God knows I clung to it long enough in the terrible days to come. She was fitted with a mast which must be hauled upright, with a square sail, a spritsail, that I do remember. I had stowed the water cans and the food, wrapped in canvas and oilskin under the seat. Now I began to bail out the water, as once I had done before, scraping at the bottom of the boat, tipping the contents out into the sea. A time was to come when we should all think ourselves mad to have thrown away that water from the sweet, fresh rain.

He took up his oar again and she hers. ‘We must get as far away as we can. If they come aboard the brig and start using the glass—well, anyway, the further, the better. And so hope for some other vessel to pick us up and meanwhile think what best we can then say.’ To another man, some story might be, however doubtfully, credible: but to Morehouse, who already knew so much—coming upon the brig, hastily abandoned when his own ship must have been already in sight… Another ship finding us needn’t know that we had not gone earlier, before we ever saw that help was at hand. ‘I must have been mad,’ he kept muttering to himself as he rowed. ‘I must have been out of my mind.’ She lifted her hand a moment from the oar and laid it on one of his but he seemed not even to notice it. I, creeping about the bottom of the boat with my scraping tin can, thought to myself that it was a long time since Benjamin Briggs had been anything but out of his mind.