Honey Harlot (9 page)

He stopped dead in the doorway. I think he was utterly astonished, he had thought me a thing of whey as a wife should be, discounted my little uprush of pettishness, up on deck, earlier; now was astounded and perhaps perturbed by its persistence. He said: ‘You are behaving like a silly child.’

‘If one’s treated like a silly child,’ I said, ‘that’s the way one behaves. You told me to sit in a chair, to remain down here, to speak to no one…’

The steward came down the companion steps in the adjoining saloon, with a rattle of china and metal to lay the table for the midday meal. My husband closed the door behind himself and came forward into the cabin. ‘I simply instruct you not to be familiar with the crew.’

‘Who else is there to be familiar with?’ I said. And I took a leaf out of Mary’s wicked book of mischief. ‘Or are there any ladies aboard, to be friends with me?’

‘There’ll be no ladies at all aboard on my next trip,’ he said, ‘if this is to be your behaviour.’

‘If you mean you’ll not take me with you,’ I said, ‘I can think of no greater blessing and no greater peace.’

He sat down slowly in the other chair, leaned his head for a moment in his hands, his elbows on the table. When he lifted his head again his face was very grim. ‘Am I to understand, Mrs Briggs, that you are settling in to a married life of playing the termagant?’

‘A chained dog will bark,’ I said.

The sparks flew from his eyes, his black beard jutted fierce. ‘A dog may be beaten,’ he said. ‘A dog may be lashed into obedience.’

I had learned some lessons in the past half hour. ‘Will you lash me?’ I said. ‘Is it to be known about the waterfronts of the world that Captain Benjamin Briggs can’t keep his wife in order without physical violence? Because, Captain Briggs, lay one finger upon me, and I’ll see that it
is
so known. I swear that to you. And if you think I can’t—’

‘Your friends among my crew will work for you, no doubt?’ he said. ‘You waste very little time, Madam. I see now what you’re about.’

I could not reply; and my silence I think really stunned him, he recognised the impossible—that the threat I made, might really be carried out. He changed tack a little. He said slowly: ‘You’re not the girl I thought you to be when I married you.’

‘Nor you the man I thought you to be,’ I said, ‘when I married
you.
Nor the man my father thought you to be, either. He thought you a decent, good man who would care for his daughter not threaten, within a month of her marriage, to lash her like a dog. Not that my father would lash a dog. He has respect for all things weaker than himself.’

‘If you are weaker than I, Sarah,’ said my husband, ‘you give little evidence of it at this moment.’ And he turned away his head. He said, and I think that he meant it, he felt it in his soul: ‘You disgust me.’

I felt my heart tremble within me, I felt that I had been indeed rough and unwomanly, I felt that I had betrayed my marriage vows of obedience and cherishing. But I remembered Mary’s hand holding mine close in her own, I remembered the recognition that had come to so hardened and experienced a woman, of my wrongs; ‘I know how he uses you,’ she had said, ‘—a young creature, innocent, not a tough veteran like me…’ ‘And you disgust
me
,’ I said to my husband, ‘and have from the first moment you laid your hands on me, an untouched, untutored girl. Sail without me,’ I said triumphantly, ‘leave your kennelled bitch behind! Some waterfront woman would serve you better than I can; and I daresay will.’

That terrible grey beneath the weather-beaten tan! The dark, bright eye growing dim with some hidden sickness within him, hands trembling… Who now was the cowering dog? He lumbered to his feet, turned and almost stumbled out of the room and I was left with my triumph alone.

Little Sarah Briggs, four weeks a bride, from a minister’s home in a small town in Massachusetts—striking out, ugly and vicious at the man she had, four brief weeks ago, sworn to love, honour and obey. ‘You disgust me,’ he had said. And rightly, I thought. Who am I, who is this, who yaps and bites indeed like a cornered cur? If Captain Briggs had come back to his cabin in the next hour, he would have found his wife on her knees at the bedside, sick with repentance and shame, begging help from her God.

M
Y FIRST THOUGHT WHEN
I rose from my knees was that I must prevent Mary from revealing to the men the secret of my husband’s seduction. The dinner hour was near; I had time only to scribble a note, ‘I regret what we arranged. Tell no one the secret,’ and even as I wrote I heard my husband and Gilling come down the companion, and had time to say no more. I had hoped that he might come into the cabin so that I could have had a private word with him, but he did not and when I came into the saloon, I saw that he had taken his place at the table; he did not meet my eye. I said to Gilling, ‘May I have one second to speak to my husband in private?’ He shrugged and, starting to whistle, moved away and leaned against the door of Richardson’s cabin. I wondered if Mary were still in there; and he must have wondered too, or known that she was, for behind his back his fingers beat a soft little tattoo against the wood. I sat down in my corner place opposite my husband and said, very low: ‘I want to tell you that I’m sorry.’

I think that a load fell away from him; he had been uncertain what he should do if I persisted in my rebellion. He said only, however, ‘Very well.’

‘I repent, I’ve said my prayers.’

‘We will speak of it later,’ he said, coldly, and gestured Gilling to come back to the table.

The old crushing defeat. I sat with hanging head, pushing about my plate the slosh of meat and vegetables, I felt unable to eat. ‘What is the matter?’ said my husband. ‘Can’t you eat your meal?’

‘We’ve reverted to the way Mrs Briggs doesn’t like it,’ said Gilling, with a sneer.

‘We’ve reverted to swill,’ said my husband. ‘And I don’t know which is worse.’

‘Mrs Briggs hasn’t cooked in a ship’s galley,’ said Gilling. ‘No doubt things are different in a fancy equipped kitchen in New England.

‘Time is the same anywhere,’ I said, resentfully. ‘The food is cooked for too long. However, don’t think I’m interfering again, because I’m not. Today, I am simply not hungry.’

I thought the mate looked a little surprised at this small show of spirit, but I did not care. All I wanted was to get the message to Mary before more mischief was done. When the meal was over, however, and the two men had left, the boy Tedhead remained, messing about in the pantry and then set about cleaning up the saloon. I didn’t know whether or not he would be aware of Mary’s hiding place in the cabin and dared not go to her; I must simply sit him out, I thought, and then go to the cabin. But before he had done, the man Martens came, another of the German seamen, and knocked at my door. ‘Message from Captain, Ma’am. Hammock has been slung for you amidships. If you wanting fresh air, you should going dere. Cap’n says, if you want reading, is book in table drawer. That’s message, Ma’am. So please to coming mit me and I showing you.’

There was nothing to do but to go with him. I fetched the Bible from the drawer and went up to the deck after him; and as I went, surreptitiously slipped the note I had scribbled, in through the slit of the sliding door of the first mate’s cabin. There was no sound from within.

So now instead of being chained to a chair in my cabin, I was chained to a hammock on the deck. I would not be ungrateful, for here at least was the fresh salt air, and the sparkle and roll of the ocean, the restless, moving, swirling roll with its upflung white lace ruffles of spray. But, a girl brought up in the country, I longed for exercise, to pace the scrubbed decks with their dark lines of caulking, to revel in the easy balance with which I rocked a little with the rocking of the ship, to stand at the rail and look down sheer into the glassy depths. But I dared not. The brief walk from my tether in the cabin to my tether on the deck amidships was all I cared to risk. Nor was there any addition to my company; the men must have had a word spoken, for they would sketch a salute, civil enough, and simply pass by. And neither was a hammock even very comfortable; I thought that to lie in it would all too possibly be sinful luxury, and a hammock is a difficult thing to sit upright in. Exhausted with the efforts of the past two days, I summoned up a moment of secret amusement at the pass to which my one great outburst of rebellion had brought me. But I was too beaten in spirit even to dream; all my thoughts were concentrated on the effort to get Mary to alter her plan. I knew now that my only duty was to save my husband such trouble as might face him and I was sick with dismay at the depths I had sunk to, in the falling away from those duties I had so lately and freely taken on.

The next morning passed, a meal hardly edible, the early part of the afternoon. No sign of Mary; no speech with any of the crew. I grew desperate. But at last Albert Richardson came from the afterdeck and approached my half-hidden lair as though to address me. I could not forbear from saying, ‘You’re not actually about to speak to me, Mr Richardson?’

‘I have the Cap’n’s permission, Ma’am,’ he said, ‘if I have yours.’ He put on a voice of some solemnity. ‘Captain Briggs thinks it not proper for the Master’s lady to be too familiar with the crew. But the first mate’s an exception in several matters and this seems to be one of them. Besides, I have the advantage of being a married man.’ He ducked me a comic little bow and with evident difficulty smothered a grin.

I had not realised he was married and I thought back with a vague shame on that dream of the Archangel Gabriel holding me guarded close, in his encircling arm. ‘I didn’t know you were married, Mr Richardson. Is your wife in New York?’

He flushed and I knew why. ‘Well, no, Ma’am, she lives with her parents in Nova Scotia when I’m at sea.’ He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking down at me, swaying a little to balance himself against the motion of the ship, and broke into desultory conversation; but both of us I think, were conscious only of Mary Sellers in the background and of the question she posed, and I was sick with anxiety to know whether or not she had as yet revealed my husband’s secret. I brought the conversation round without too much difficulty to the subject of the ship—and so to her re-christening. ‘She was built near your wife’s home, then?’

‘Yes, Frances remembers her launching, ten years ago. They called her the Amazon then.’

‘Captain Briggs didn’t care for the name? He’s never told me,’ I said carelessly, ‘why he chose the one he did.’

He balanced back and forth on toes and heels, looking somewhat uncomfortable. ‘I think that… Mary Sellers came up to him on the quay, Ma’am, while we were painting out the old name and I think she teased him into this one from some fancy of her own.’ To my utter relief he said, and I thought with sincerity: ‘She’s a creature of mischief. To be seen with her anywhere near him was an agony to so widely respected a man as Captain Briggs. I think she stung him like a gadfly with her presence until he gave way—just to be rid of her.’

So Mary had not spoken out yet: for he above all would have known. I suggested, testing him: ‘She could tell ugly tales.’

‘No one would believe anything like that of Captain Briggs,’ he said immediately, ‘but she could embarrass him; her presence hanging on his arm—however unwilling he might be—couldn’t be explained away when all men saw it. So he’d promise her anything to get her to be gone.’ He shrugged. ‘He’s not a man to care much what a ship is called.’

Enormously relieved, I turned the subject a little. ‘We, however, can’t tell her to begone. Not till we reach land. Meanwhile, what are we to do?’

‘You know where we keep her concealed?’

‘I’m very anxious to speak to her,’ I said. At his questioning look, I amended: ‘She’s—kind. I think she doesn’t want to hurt
me;
only to tease him, because he—preaches against her and her kind. I think that I could persuade her to keep her presence secret and go ashore when we touch land. But I must talk with her myself. She’s not always in your cabin; I’ve tried a couple of times when the saloon’s been empty.’

He went red again. ‘She moves about. She has—debts to pay.’

I think that in a way, in those days I really almost loved her; it came as a shock when I was brought up short against the ugly facts of her life. Debts to pay! As the price of a piece of mischief, getting smuggled aboard to tease and torment one man, she would lie with half a dozen others, with such as the half-witted cookboy and the Lorenzen brothers… I said stiffly: ‘If you can speak to her, tell her that I must see her. I wrote her a note

My husband approached along the deck. He had not spoken a word to me since the previous evening. Now he seemed to force himself to an appearance of normality. He said: ‘Well—you two have been conversing—?’

‘Mr Richardson has been telling me about his wife,’ I said. ‘She comes from Nova Scotia, she remembers the launching of this very ship…’

For some reason he seemed annoyed; perhaps because the change in the ship’s name brought him uncomfortable memories. ‘Yes, well, very well,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’ve had a pleasant conversation. And now, if I give you my arm, perhaps you’d like some exercise around the deck?’

A girl of eighteen—to be assisted like an infirm old woman as she walked the two sides of a deck measuring a hundred foot overall! I rose obediently and wrapping my silvery shawl about me, primly tucked my hand into his arm, opening out like the wing of a chicken to receive it and closing over it again. We set off soberly enough; I subdued my country-girl stride and he no doubt was curbing his own quick, brisk step to accommodate the acceptable pace for a woman. As we went, he began a sort of questioning; for some reason not entirely agreeably. He asked me, had Richardson children? I said no, apparently none; his wife lived with her family. What did her family consist of? I had no idea, I knew only that her name was Frances. Was his own family living? I didn’t know. ‘He was a long time telling you,’ he suggested dryly, ‘that his wife’s name is Frances, he has no children and she lives in Nova Scotia.’