Honey Harlot (8 page)

‘I’m lost to know what to do about it, Volkert,’ I said.

‘He got to know.’

‘He’ll find out,’ I said.

‘Big troubles!’

‘Why did you do such a foolish thing? You knew he’d find out and that there would be trouble.’

‘Dronk!’ he said, succinctly. I guessed that coming aboard such a ship as the Mary Celeste, they would all get drunk enough the night before she sailed, to last them for a few days at least, into the long grog-less voyage.

‘And she tempted you?’

‘Dis vicked von, she tempt de Archanchel Gabriel himself.’

‘But why does she want to come?’

He shrugged. ‘For angry de Captain?’

‘Why should she want to make him angry?’

‘He make big preachings,’ he suggested, shrugging again. ‘Doing harm for Mary. De men is going off on long voyages, may be dangers, in spring Boz and I was in big dangers, big storm and wreck. Cap’n preaching they lose their souls if they going with such like Mary, they maybe going to their death this very voyage, don’t going aboard with sin on the soul. So instead, they getting dronk, too dronk for woman, Cap’n Briggs is turning blind eye to this if it keep them from woman.’ He laughed. ‘Som is paying friends keep sober and keep them from going with woman when they dronk, save their soul in case shipwreck and dangers. So Mary losing business.’ But he looked at me, sharply. ‘Not gutt talk for ladies like Mrs Briggs. I married, not gutt talk for mine vife.’

‘I know about Mary now,’ I said, ‘and it must be spoken of. I must protect my husband.’

He laughed again, and at least I saw that he had no suspicion that the kind of protection he supposed me to mean was too late. ‘Cap’n Briggs don’t need no protection, Ma’am, from Honey Mary. Very gutt man, very Got-fearing, big preaching, very strong. Besides…’ he added, with a little gesture. Besides, he meant, Captain Briggs had his own woman aboard. I could have told him: Yes, indeed!

‘I mean that this woman’s presence aboard his ship… She says she will spread it abroad that he brought her here.’

‘She iss a devil woman,’ he said, laughing. ‘Much mischief.’

I stood with my shawl hugged about me, the wind whipping my pale hair from its shining bands about my head, rocking a little, riding the movement of the ship as she sped with a following wind through the rolling grey-green waters. How vast it all was and how limitless! For a moment the affairs of men seemed very petty and sordid against that expanse of glittering deep green.

They all moved so quietly about the ship, barefooted or in soft deck shoes except when the weather drove them to their heavy sea-boots, that often, with the sound in one’s ears of the eternal swish and drag of the waves, the flapping of the sails, the creaking and groaning in the rigging, one did not hear their approach. I did not hear my husband now, only his voice calling to me sharply. I went down the steps, followed him along the deck to a place by the rail mid-way between the two upstanding roofs of the cabin quarters. He stopped there and faced me, almost hissing out at me: ‘What are you doing, up there on the poop?’

‘I was passing the time of day with Lorenzen,’ I said; but recalling the subject of our conversation, I daresay that tell-tale colour of mine that came up so easily under my delicate skin, betrayed my unease.

‘Are you to spend your whole time aboard, in vulgar gossip with my crew?’

‘Gossip?—how could I gossip with them, what have I to gossip about?’ Yet, exactly what had I been doing? ‘I like to find out about the ship,’ I said. ‘I like to ask questions.’

‘The person to answer questions about the ship is the Master,’ he said. ‘In future, confine your curiosity to my care.’ His dark eye kindled, I think he would have spoken more angrily but that he remembered the violent scolding of yesterday; he had himself always under an iron control. I said: ‘Am I never to speak to the men? I must converse with someone.’

‘You can converse with your husband.’

It was on my tongue to reply that he never conversed with
me,
but I also must recall the previous afternoon and his efforts to make himself agreeable. I said, ‘You are often occupied

‘So are the men occupied,’ he said, ‘or would be if you wouldn’t keep interfering with their work. They should be keeping their minds on what they ‘re doing.’

‘Volk was just standing at the wheel,’ I protested. ‘It took no great effort of concentration.’

He glared at me, bright-eyed, fierce and frightening, with his black, jutting beard. ‘Get down to your quarters,’ he said, and would have turned and gone about his own duties but a flare of hot temper blazed up in me suddenly. I caught at him by the rough serge sleeve of his jacket. ‘Get to my quarters!—like a dog to its kennel? Am I to spend four weeks or more, cooped up down there?—you’ll put me on a chain, perhaps, with a heap of straw—but no, for I might lie down upon the straw and you not there to take advantage of it…’ I think that the colour flared up in his face, I know that it did in mine but I was lost suddenly to all but the injustice of it, the inhumanity of it. ‘I must breathe, I’m a living creature, I must sometimes breathe a little fresh air. If I go forward for it, you tell me to go back to the stern, if I go to the stern the men are there, am I to stand like a dumb fool if they wish me good morning—?’

‘Forrard,’ he said, coldly correcting me. ‘And you go aft or astern, not “to the stern”.’

I don’t know what anger had got into me that I blazed up again at the cold sarcasm of his voice. ‘So I fail again! I don’t know forrard from forward or stern from aft, and why?—because I’m not allowed to learn, because I can’t so much as exchange a greeting with those whose conversation would teach me these things. I shall go through a life of nothing but shipboard and at the end still not know forrard from forward because I must be chained in my kennel and have no chance to discover. And not having discovered, I’ll be a fool, I’ll have failed. And I
shall
have failed—because as usual no one will allow me to succeed…’ He in turn caught at my arm, with a rough gesture commanding my silence lest his precious crew hear me raise my voice to him, I suppose, as none of
them
ever would have dared to do; but I tore myself from his grasp and ran, catching at the rail to steady myself, and climbed the tilting deck to the companion that led down to the main deckhouse, and half tumbled down the steps. Richardson was coming out of his cabin into the saloon and put out a hand to stop me from falling. I knew that my husband followed me and was within ear-shot. I said loud enough for him to hear: ‘Don’t touch me, you might find yourself bitten! I’m a half mad dog not safe to be let out of my kennel.’

My husband came down the companion-way after me. He said sharply to Richardson, ‘Out!’ and as the mate went off, looking back doubtfully, put a hand to my shoulder and I stumbled ahead of him into the cabin. I stood with my shoulders hunched, my back to him; his hand was raised, if I had turned to him, I think he could not have controlled himself from hitting me. But he only stood, rigid, and at last simply leaving me standing there, went out of the cabin. I heard his crisp step across the saloon and up the companion and the swish and bang of the door as it slid-to behind him. I knew better now than to fling myself across the bed, but I fell on my knees before one of the swivel chairs and put my head down on my arms and burst into a heartbreak of tears: and behind me a voice said, ‘Poor little Sarah!’ A woman’s voice.

And she stood there, Honey Mary, in her scarlet dress, with her wild hair all about her beautiful face. I remained kneeling, staring up at her and jerked out at last, ‘Go away, he’ll find you!’

She stood with her hands on her hips. ‘What do
I
care for that?’

‘If he finds you here with me—’

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘That’s different. Poor little Sarah!’ And she stooped and took my arm and raised me up and almost tenderly, taking the handkerchief from my waistband, patted away the wet tears, with a gentle hand pushed aside the strands of my hair. ‘There, my honey,’ she said. ‘No more tears!’ And she shushed me like a child. ‘Hush, now. Hush, now. Poor, frightened, bullied little girl

‘I lost my temper,’ I said.

‘And magnificently! Though why should the mad dog bite poor Albert Richardson, he does you no harm, he thinks the whole world of you.’

‘You heard me?’ I stammered.

She gestured with her head to the saloon and the door of the chief mate’s cabin. ‘I lay very snug last night; poor Bert for very terror of discovery, dossing elsewhere, however—such a night of peace I haven’t enjoyed for a long time.’

‘You’ve been in Mr Richardson’s cabin?’

‘There’s one place the master of a vessel respects. The chief mate is on a near equality. Captain Briggs knows his sea-going manners.’

But the fear was returning to me, blotting out all else. ‘If he finds you in here—’

‘Well, then, come in there and we’ll talk.’

‘No, no,’ I protested, ‘he would come back and find me—off my chain… He’d search the ship for me.’

‘Well, he’ll not return for a little while. Listen, you can hear his voice; having lost his temper for no reason, he’ll be looking for a reason to have lost it.’ And indeed, he could be heard roaring furious instructions up to the rigging, where all had been peace and order till now. She looked round her. ‘In case we should be caught—where could I hide?’ There was a W.C. in the corner, with a curtain pulled across it. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, I shall dodge in there.’ And she laughed outright. ‘A fine moment when he comes in, all unbreeched, to find a woman there already!’

‘Mary,’ I begged, ‘please go—I dare not talk to you.’ But I knew that here was my opportunity; to talk to her, to plead with her, to plan with her how my husband might be spared from the threat her presence posed for him. I begged: ‘Don’t let him find you! Go ashore when we reach land, I’ll find money to help you, you shall have all I own, I have a pin with a pearl in it… Why should you wish to injure him?’

She sat down slowly in the chair, took my two hands in hers, sat there looking up at me. ‘You still try to
protect
him?’

No other thought had come to me. I said stupidly: ‘He’s my husband.’

‘Who treats you like a kennelled bitch. And
… I
know how he uses you—a young creature, innocent, not a tough veteran like me. Why should you care for him?—let him be taught a lesson and he’ll treat you very differently ever after, I’ll promise you that. You’ll have the whip hand then.’

My whole skin crawled with the terror of discovery, she sitting there so bold and careless, holding my hands in hers, as though she were my friend—a whore of the waterside. But my husband’s voice could still be heard shouting directions. I whispered: ‘What would you do?’

‘Well…’ She considered it, easily, swinging the swivelling chair a little bit this way and that, like a child. ‘If none knew but you…’

‘I know already,’ I said, and felt the hot flush under my skin.

That stopped the casual swing to and fro. ‘He
told
you?’

‘I saw his face when he came back from—from you.’

She shrugged. ‘Anyway, I didn’t mean that. What threat would that mean to him?—you’d never tell anyone, poor little mealy-mouthed girl, and if you did no one would believe you, they’d say you were jealous and without any reason…’ She seemed not to think it disgusting and ludicrous that a married woman should be jealous of her husband’s—filth—in the arms of such a woman as herself; and indeed… She wasn’t like other such women, as I’d seen them down there on the quayside, she was not sluttish and vulgar, she was brilliant and beautiful, a queen. ‘But…’ She gave a little wriggle in the chair, her face took on that look of mischief—of wickedness really—and yet she had the magic of laughter to turn it into no worse than a mischievous naughtiness. She said: ‘No one but these men know I’m here—seven of them, Richardson and Gilling, and the cookboy and the four Germans. They’ll do what I tell them—or, when they come in to New York from their various voyages, how sorry they’ll be! So that if none know but you and I and a handful of men who’ll keep silent—what a threat you hold over him then! You have but to give the signal, and we shall have it spread over every waterfront on the trade routes, before the month is out—the great Captain Benjamin Briggs seduced, brought down by Honey Mary of the New York docks and smuggled aboard for his pleasure during the trip to Genoa and back—and with his innocent young wife aboard, the disgrace of it!’ She clapped her white hands together, bending her face over them, alight with laughter. ‘My honey, you have him by the short hairs! “Treat me fair, or I’ll tell all! Do this, do that, do as I bid you—or I’ve but to say the word to my friends, and they will tell all! It’s only by my bidding that they haven’t already.”’ She caught at my hand again. ‘And—“leave me in peace when I wish for peace—or I’ll tell all.”’

I coloured again; so crude and outspoken! my ‘friend’—a waterside harlot my ‘friend’, and a crew of men, rough and violent, uncontrolled and in their behaviour licentious—my ‘friends’. And to be hand in glove with them, to make a pact with them… And against my own husband! ‘But, Mary—’ I began…

‘No buts,’ she said. ‘It was for him to protect and cherish you and he does neither. Your life will be one of endless misery—Sarah, honey, I mean it!—unless you use this whip which God puts into your hand. You have but to tell him next time he offends you, “If you won’t have more care for me, I shall tell all your secrets.” No need to be rough about it, poor gentle little thing that you are. He seduced me—I seduced him, more like, to teach him a lesson, the tub-thumping hypocrite—’

I let that go by, I clutched at the word ‘secrets’; I said urgently, ‘The crew don’t know about that?’

‘They shall,’ she said, as though it were a promise. ‘I’d kept it to myself so far, for my own ends; a little blackmailing secret may come in handy any time. But I’ll tell them now. Your hold over him would be nothing without that. He could always deny that he’d known of my coming aboard; the other he wouldn’t deny—with all his faults, he couldn’t lie, I think, and anyway his face would flame and go grey and flame again, he’d give himself away.’ And suddenly her hand tightened on mine, ‘He’s coming!’—and she was gone, a whirl of scarlet, out of the cabin, across the floor of the saloon—it was all a short enough distance in all conscience. I rushed after her but in time only to catch a glimpse of the door of the chief mate’s cabin softly closing and my husband’s feet and legs appearing at the top of the companion-way. I dodged back into my own cabin and when he entered was sitting stiffly upright in one of the two chairs. I didn’t wait to know his mood. Strong in my new strength, I said coldly: ‘You find me sitting upright, as instructed. Breathing the nice, foetid cabin air, as instructed. In silence and alone—as instructed.’