Honey Harlot (13 page)

Up here on deck, the air was heavy as lead and yet a wind blew, lashing up the waves in the darkness, tossing the ship so that we must cling tight to the rail, lurching as we lifted our hands for a moment to raise our shawls and wrap them over our heads, one hand holding them close at the throat, the other back, grasping the bulwarks—if bulwarks is the term; the words come back to me but I have long forgotten what little I ever learned in the few brief weeks of my life that were spent at sea. All about us, the restless dark: no horizon now, sea met sky in a bowl of black, flecked only with the white flashes of the wave-tops. Against the ship’s pale hull, the dark water lifted and thundered, splashing back in a flurry of white foam that threw up a sprinkle of salt water. We started back, startled, but leaned forward again, thrusting out our faces to the clean, fresh sting of it; our hair broke loose from the tight-wrapped shawls and whipped about our cheeks; as the gale heightened our heavy skirts swirled about our legs, we let go of the rail to hold them close and without the steadying clutch, reeled and staggered, laughing, supporting one another. All about the ship now, men ran, calling; in the glow of a lantern we could see the mate’s face, shadowed, as he clung two-fisted to the wheel, turning her, hand following hand on the heavy spokes, to port, hand after hand to starboard, again. My husband came hurrying up the companion-way, all but his ship forgotten; stood gazing up into the rigging, his heavy serge trousers flattened against his legs, shouting to the men who hung like monkeys, with spread feet and gripping hands, reefing in the sails. In the oaken buckets along the edge of the poop deck, the water sloshed to and fro, spilling over, forming little runnels that wavered like small rivers, run this way and that by the movement of the ship. There was a sort of low, moaning sound as the wind got up, like the music of a violin wailing against the drum-rattle of the sails flap-flapping, the beating of rope against wood, the creak of the timbers as the little ship ploughed on, the waves lashing up white against her hull. Past orders meant no more to me now, I took Mary’s hand and, leaning into the wind we fought our way up to the bows… Into the bows of the ship, into the forepeak, leaning forward to stare out across the unseen waters… Mary said, ‘It’s like being a figurehead, under the bowsprit, thrusting out into the sea

I am a figurehead—chin thrust forward into the gale, streamlined by the wind whipping back my streaming hair, my shawl wrapped close by the wind streaming out behind me, my gown wrapped about my body by the wind, streaming out behind me like the wings of the Winged Victory. I am a figurehead, leaning into the wind with the salt water dashing up against my pale face, washing away the stains of my husband’s hand. I am a figurehead not a wooden thing now but of flesh and blood with a will and a strength—with a heart of my own…

Now I might have taken the food to her cabin myself, but she would have none of that. ‘No, no, my honey, you do me out of all the little amusement I may get.’ So he must send one or other of the men; and she would force aside the door and standing there in the opening, her wicked eyes alight with mischief call out across the saloon: ‘Are you there, my honey-love, are you watching me? Where is he, does the tiger not hear the belling of his tigress in her lair?’ And so at last, ashamed that others should hear her—even though they would never believe it to be true—not of the famous Captain Briggs—he must take the food to her himself, bringing me to stand beside him, jamming the door so that it opened only far enough to hand in the plates. But she ignored me, snaked out a golden arm, caught him by the hair. ‘Is it you at last, have you come to me at last, my Samson?—have you come at last to love me, as you loved me through the long hours till our strength was gone?—you who had had the strength of Samson to resist, till Delilah got her fingers into this rough, dark hair…’ He interrupted her furiously, raising his voice in curses I had never heard before, but she outshrilled him; and when at last he slammed the door across her laughing face, called out to him still until I opened the door and said, ‘Be silent now, Mary. He’s not here, he’s gone.’

She relapsed back on the bunk, drumming the scarlet heels of her boots—she wore the red dress again today—against the mate’s wooden sea-chest, stowed away under it. ‘So he runs scuttling off,’ she said, ‘and leaves it to you to quiet the great cat in its cage. What a gutless coward and poltroon the creature is!’

‘If he’s a coward,’ I said, ‘it’s out of shame.’

‘Then he’s a coward to
be
ashamed. Low, crawling thing!—afraid to face the world of men for doing what any man does and struts like a cockerel afterwards for pride, not mealy-mouthed, preaching, pretending innocence

‘He makes no pretence,’ I said, defending him. ‘He tells no lies. And I don’t think he’ll preach any more.’

‘He’d have preached and pretended,’ she said, ‘if he hadn’t been found out. He’s preached and pretended all his life. Why doesn’t he admit to being like other men?’

‘He thinks other men do wrong,’ I said, ‘in giving way to their worse natures.’

She reached up her lovely arms, so creamy white, ran her fingers through the heavy curls that fell about her shoulders, lifted her hair up and away from her neck, let it fall again. I see the movement now in its unconscious grace and I knew that if I had been a man, I could never have resisted her. ‘He believes it wrong,’ I said, ‘and so of course it
is
wrong, for him; and so he falls from his own high self-esteem. But… The serpent beguiled him ‘Trust Adam,’ she said, ‘to shift the blame to Eve!’

My husband and I made each a grave mistake—two terrible mistakes which were to have unimaginable consequences. Brave in my new-found strength, I refused him all bodily contact with me. Craven in his dread of her taunting, he kept her close shut in her trap. But the tiger had tasted red meat and now knew the hunger for more; and the tigress had fed all her life upon men and could not for too long be denied. In a night of dead calm, she broke out of her cage: and they two ravenous creatures came face to face.

T
HE DAYS PASSED AND
, as I’ve said, fell into a sort of routine. When the dinner hour was over, we would go up on deck, Honey Mary and I, harlot and innocent, and there gossip and laugh like two ordinary young women, taking our exercise round and round the narrow decks, sitting in my hammock corner amidships, out of the way; or curl up on the bunk in Richardson’s cabin and there amuse ourselves as best we might with the few diversions at our disposal. My husband had forbidden me novels but we played a sort of game of alternative storytelling, each taking up where the other left off; and the men had devised us a draughts board. But Mary beat me every time. Nor was it very easy to play for we had come into real Atlantic weather, very rough with a heavy swell and the ship rolled and tilted till the draughtsmen ran sliding into her territory or mine and made a nonsense of the whole thing. So mostly we conversed and it’s wonderful to think what we could find to talk about over those weeks together, cut off from other company—for true to her undertaking, she spoke to no one else during our times up on deck and now she accepted my bringing the food to her cabin and made no more trouble over that. For the rest, I told her of my quiet country home and, dull though it all seemed to me, to her it was of intense interest to learn of a life that she had never given thought to—a life where a young woman might not lift her skirts above her ankles; where best clothes were reserved for Sunday going to church, and replaced only when new apparel for church became necessary, so that even the young girls went always soberly attired; where the events of the year were the festivals attached to the chapel, with no balls or parties, for dancing was a sin; where the heights of excitement were the picnic parties, in our home town and in those close enough by, to ride to or drive—where the mothers of eligible young men and indeed the young men themselves looked not so much to a girl’s pretty looks or charming ways, but to the hampers they produced and the excellence of the pies and cakes they handed round. ‘But surely the mothers just did the cooking themselves,’ said Mary, ‘and pretended the daughters did it?’ That church-going people would not cheat and deceive never entered that head of hers. I remembered my mother’s helpless shame as I produced my poor offerings. No wonder she had been thankful when Captain Briggs came along and, careless of such shortcomings, took one look, as I now knew, at a something in me that stirred his physical senses and out of them all, chose
me.
After all, he was mostly at sea with a cook in the galley; and no doubt he recognised that such a fool as I must be grateful and therefore docile and uncomplaining; that I came from a family who would never listen to, let alone accept, for that matter would never comprehend, any complaints I might make—but would never dare to make—of his treatment of his wife. Indeed, how my parents ever came to contrive half a dozen children between them, I wonder still.

A ship is a restless, moving, sounding thing, rocking, swaying, dipping, with everything aboard her having a life of its own: the hanging oil lamps swinging, small articles sliding this way and that with the motion of the vessel, the water sloshing in the brass-bound firebuckets, and over all the rattle of the sails in the breeze, the ceaseless creak and groan of rope straining against wood; and, eternally, the slap and hiss of the sea against the curved hull cutting its way through the waves. My husband’s watch hung on its chain on the white painted wall at the head of the bed; as I kneel here on my prie-Dieu before the carved crucifix, I seem still to hear its loud ticking in my ears, as I heard it through those long, long sleepless nights: ticking away the little time left for me to pray his soul back out of the limbo of his present penance into the eternal light. Be merciful, oh God!—for his sins arose from those passions which You implanted in his body, against which even his fear and respect for his Maker proved at last too frail… Can You hold him responsible, most merciful Lord?—for sins committed when surely his mind was no longer the sane mind of the man who had loved and feared You all his life. For truly in his heart and soul, until his mind betrayed him, my husband, Benjamin Briggs, was a Godfearing man…

Lying sleepless there through the long nights with the log of his body lying beside me, asleep or waking I cared not—should I not have known? In all that small, enclosed world of sound and movement, should I not have recognised that not every sound, not every movement was part of the ceaseless sound and movement of a speeding ship? But we came at last into a calm—and then I knew.

It was very strange, that sudden calm at sea. All at once—quietness. All at once—stillness. All sails spread but no straining and bellying out before the’ thrusting wind, the rigging slack and uncomplaining, the whole ship steady and motionless; and stretching limitless the glassy green of the sea, no white spray now, only a gently undulating movement as though beneath the stretched surface, a myriad dolphins heaved with their rounded backs and never broke through. The crew were set to scrubbing and polishing, the decks were white again with their lines of dark caulking, the brass shone like gold. We had been now seventeen days at sea and come two thousand miles and much of the time had been fairly rough going; so that, though no sailor likes a calm, especially when he has a journey to complete with a cargo to deliver—there was perhaps a feeling of respite, a period for ‘catching up’ on work to bring the ship into the sort of order Captain Briggs required of her. We had perhaps eight hundred miles more to sail; and he may have looked forward to bringing her in as ship-shape as she had been when she sailed—yet another high mark against the name of a master famed for his care for his ships.

And in Honey Mary there reigned also, in these latter days, a sort of calm. Should I not have known?

For on that night—the night of November 23rd—is it sixty?—seventy?—years ago—I heard a creaking and a movement that was not part of the natural sounds of a moving ship. And I knew then. My husband, alert to every smallest detail that might affect his vessel, stirred in his sleep, forced himself to wakefulness, raised himself on his elbow and said: ‘What was that?’

‘I heard nothing,’ I said, lying.

‘Nothing?’

‘I’ve been wide awake. There’s been nothing. Not a sound.’

He rose, nevertheless, went to the cabin door, listened intently. Sick to the depths of my heart I prayed, ‘Let them keep quiet!’ He left the doorway, I heard his feet pad across the saloon, he must have gone up the companion and slid aside the door. His voice called out, low, to the man idling at the wheel: ‘Is all well?’

‘Ay, ay, sir. Not a breath of wind.’

An English voice; it must have been Richardson on the watch. Something in my heart was glad. My husband returned. He got back into the bed—he slept on the outer side of the broad bunk, and said: ‘It was part of my dream.’ He dreamed a lot in those days, tossing and moaning in his sleep. But now we lay in silence, only the watch tick-ticking above our heads.

I slept at last: was startled awake by a violent oath, my husband leapt out of the bunk and, in his nightshirt, rushed across and flung back the cabin door. I scrambled out and followed him. The door of the chief mate’s cabin where Mary slept was half closed; and the second mate, Gilling, who was standing at the foot of the companion-way up out of the saloon, turned back.

My husband yelled out his name in a violent command; and the door of the cabin opened wide and Mary stood there, with her bright hair tumbled back over her shoulders and her wicked, mischievous, half-horrified, half-triumphant face. And she was naked.

My mind was numbed with terror, what time passed I could not tell; as I stood there in the doorway, words thundered between the two men, my husband black with outrage, the mate in a sort of defiant bravado: I see only in my mind’s eye that ivory figure standing there with her head flung back and all the golden hair curling about her splendid shoulders—laughing. He cried to her to close the door upon her shame, I know; cursed at the man Gilling, vilifying him as a foul, Godless lecher—and she called back to him that he had seen her thus before, had he not? and made no objection then—and Gilling laughed also then and said that he’d done no more than the Master had before him, as now it seemed… And the time passed, or no time passed, I couldn’t say; but there was a sort of blackness, a faintness, and then suddenly my husband was standing towering over me. ‘You knew of this! You’ve known of it all along! When I asked you if you heard the sounds of his creeping to her bed, you answered—no…’ And because the man stood defiant, I suppose, and because the woman stood naked and he dared not approach her, all his fear and wrath turned themselves upon me, crouching there helpless, clinging to the edge of the doorway, trembling, shuddering, a pitiful, guilty thing. ‘Did you not know of it?’ he yelled at me, standing over me there. ‘Did you not hear him come to her? Did you not lie to me…?’ I could not answer him: and for a second time he lifted his hand to me.