Honey Harlot (4 page)

I was leaning in my useless, idle way over the deck rail, looking down—what else had I to do with my days? And I saw how once again my husband turned grey white beneath the brown skin, how he jerked away from her and made some exclamation that in another man would have been an oath. The mate, astounded, took her by the shoulder and clearly bade her begone. She looked into his face and laughed and he also lost colour and then flushed red across his tan. ‘Trot away, little man,’ she seemed to say to him, ‘or I shall tell tales of you to this stern master of yours, that will lose you your berth in his fine ship, Amazon.’ He was not a little man but a fine, upstanding fellow and yet, indeed, he turned and moved away. But my husband, I think, had spoken a word also. ‘Leave me to deal with her,’ no doubt he said.

And so into my world of reconstructed dialogue again. ‘Well, well, my fine Captain, so you would deny old friends?’

‘Go away from me, woman, get away from me! How dare you approach me like this?’

‘Why, Captain, it was you who approached
me,
but two days ago: and approached very close indeed.’

‘All that’s forgotten, buried deep, covered over; get away from me now and no more trouble me.’

‘Ah, but it’s you who now trouble
me,
Captain Briggs. For you tell me to forget, but how can I forget such an hour as that which we two spent together—?’

‘I came to save your soul. You with your wickedness came very near to condemning mine to everlasting perdition.’

‘How happy a perdition, however, since we shall share it together!’

‘Get away, get away!’ he will have cried, turning about and about as though a venomous insect troubled him.

‘How can I go when all this body hungers for your body again?’

I saw how he made to leave her, if she would not leave
him;
but she caught him by the arm. Did she whisper to him then that threat of blackmail?—that threat which amounted to blackmail, against his great reputation for Godliness and good. Did she say: ‘Shall I tell all the world how I crave for your kisses and yet you will leave me?’ Did he, succumbing to blackmail, ask her: ‘What will you take to let me be?’

I saw her glance up to where the men stood on the hanging cradle, staring down, wondering. The price of her silence?’—‘Name your ship after me!’

And proclaim his hideous wrong-doing to all the world! ‘You know that’s impossible, you know I could never do that.’

‘Well, then…’ And the mischievous, teasing smile, taunting him, threatening him. I think that she meant him no harm; not really. She thought him a self-righteous, preaching prig and would teach him a lesson; I think she never dreamt of the cringing terror within his soul at the thought that his world of high reputation might tumble about his ears. Or, Morehouse, perhaps, without some outward sign would not credit her story of conquest, simply could not believe it accomplished so easily. At any rate, ‘Come, Captain, you know my name, it’s written on the cross you so considerately brought back to me—’

‘And betrayed,’ he would bitterly acknowledge.

‘And having betrayed it, must now write up on your ship’s bows the name inscribed upon it. Mary Sellers. Come, call it up to your men!’

‘You know that I can’t. Anything else. Money; I’ve paid you already. I’ll pay you yet more to hold your wicked tongue.’

‘My wicked tongue has touched your lips, Captain Briggs, and all the world shall know of it if you won’t do me this simple favour—paint my name up there!’

‘If I leave the name as it is,’ he mutters, poor wretch, ‘it will suit you well enough.’

‘Then write Mary Sellers, Amazon. Or Mary Sellers, Harlot or Whore or Mary Sellers my own Bad Angel or what you will; but Mary Sellers it must be.’ And she clung to his arm, looking up at him, laughing, teasing, and all the world looking on. ‘I’ll call her by your name, Mary,’ he said at last. ‘That will satisfy your vanity and no one need know of it.’

‘Mary Sellers,’ she insisted and swung herself about—I watched from the deck, keeping back out of sight, sick with fear for him, sick with compassion—and hung her arms now about his neck and raised her face as though he must stoop to kiss her. ‘Come, lover, give to Mary Sellers that hot, sweet mouth of yours, and say no more of refusal to paint her name upon your ship’s bows as yours is painted in letters of hell fire across her heart

Who knows what in fact she said? Who knows how far her wickedness took her, that wickedness that was in those early days but a sort of mischief really, a sort of malicious teasing, a sort of punishment for his strictures on sins in her, which in fact were sins of his own commissioning. I know at least that he wrenched her arms from his neck, flung her away from him, called up sharply to the men; and that the name M—a—r—y slowly appeared over the blotted-out name of Amazon. But when he came to the second name, his heart failed him. He compromised; and so the name Mary Celeste was blazoned across the brigantine’s bows, that has ever since been blazoned across the memory of men’s minds whenever mention is made of great mysteries of the sea.

From that day on, he worked with feverish haste to be gone. In the hurry of loading, two kegs of alcohol were dropped, stoving in the longboat which any such vessel as the brigantine would carry, as well as the small boat-yawl with its single sail. But the delay in repairing it was too much for him and he would not wait. On 6 November, five days before she had been due to leave, the newly christened Mary Celeste set sail from New York, Genoa bound.

I
T WAS COLD BUT
bright in those first days out from New York but there was a strong wind ahead, and we anchored for the night off Staten Island so that it was actually on Tuesday, 7 November that, in a light breeze, we sailed down the quiet waters and at last out into the ocean. For the first time I knew what it was to be out of sight of land, a tiny world alone, encompassed by the shining sea.

I had been at first enchanted by my trim little new home, the ship so shining and pretty at her moorings, loading her cargo. We had travelled separately down from Marion, the ship being sailed round by a skeleton crew, my husband meanwhile seeing to her papers and picking up more hands in New York. The accommodation was cramped enough, the cabin I shared with my husband a narrow room, only six foot wide by twelve or fourteen long, with a water closet at one end, curtained off; and a double bunk in the next corner, a window at each end looking out on to the top deck, and a swinging oil lamp. There was no access to the deck, you must pass through a door at one corner, cross the saloon and so go up the companion-way to the after-deck, ducking your head in the low doorway, stepping over the high sill that in heavy seas would keep out waters sweeping across the deck. ‘Companion-way’—‘afterdeck’—the terms come back to me but I have forgotten most of them—indeed in the short time I spent aboard that ship or any ship, I never learned the difference between port and starboard and hardly know it now; and though my life had been spent in a town on the waterfront, I never could understand them as other girls learned to, going aboard ship for visits, talking with sailor men—halyards, bollards, top-gallants and winches, I could no more understand it all than fly. I shall have to say simply what I mean and if I name these things wrongly or give them no nautical names at all—well, I am very old, for many, many years, if I have spoken at all, have spoken in a language not my own, and anyway have long forgotten what little I ever knew…

So—it was all very pretty and charming, but I soon found that there was little enough for me to do. Always humble and unsure, I had been afraid at first of failing in my marital duties but, as they had been from the day of my wedding, my duties remained confined to the night hours and consisted then only in passivity; lying passive beneath the weight of his violence breaking out from the repression of his long life of celibate virtue—passive, a victim, and as such in myself a reproach. My first timid efforts at reciprocity met only with a shocked disgust and so I desisted. A God-fearing man. For the rest…

For the rest—what was there to do but dream? All my life I had retreated from the insecurities of my childhood into a world of make-believe where I was no longer incompetent Sarah, but a creature of beauty and brilliance, all free from fear; and now increasingly the days dragged by, I fell into fantasies that would obliterate the dread of the nights to follow, and so passed gradually into a world of unrealities, as frightened children do. Perhaps in those days I was indeed not much more than that—a frightened child. A frightened child with a woman’s burdens to bear.

On the first morning out to sea, I was up early. I said to my husband, ‘Shall I help with the breakfast—?’

‘With the breakfast?’ he said, as though astonished.

‘Shall I not do something to help with the meals? I’m quite ready to work.’

‘You’re the Master’s wife,’ he said. ‘Don’t meddle with what’s not your business.’

Heaven knows, I was no cook but I had in me always a rather pathetic eagerness to pick myself up off the ground, and try all over again. I said, ‘Isn’t cooking my business? At any rate, I could lay out the table. I have nothing else to do.’

‘If you would practise your music,’ he said, ‘and learn to play this thing that has cost so much money and trouble, you would give your husband at least some small pleasure in return for all this unearned leisure.’

This was my melodeon, his wedding gift to me: so that I might play to him the simple hymn tunes that brought balm to his tormented soul. Did he ever recognise, I wonder, that it was hardly a gift to me, who loving music, had yet no aptitude for it, but a gift to himself. Well, if it was, he derived little joy from it; my long, inapt fingers would not master the keys, my hands would droop at the wrists, I would fall as ever into my clouds of abstraction. I would see myself strong and beautiful, I would see myself standing in the bows of a ship more magnificent than the little brigantine, I would see myself petrified into the very figurehead at her prow, hands folded over my bosom, head thrust forward into the silver spray, hair blown back… (Did it ever occur to me how
she
would have looked, Honey Mary, with those heavy curls tossed back by the wind of the ship’s swift voyaging through the shining waters? If ever there was a woman to serve as model for a ship’s figurehead, it was she.)

That first dinner time, my husband came to the cabin and led me through into the saloon where a long table was laid for three with benches on two sides of it. The saloon was about fourteen feet by twelve, but a corner was taken out of it for the first mate’s cabin and a second corner for the pantry, with the steps, the companion-way if I have it right, leading up to the top deck, between these two. The whole was lighted from overhead by the raised skylight of glass.

The first mate was Richardson, that one who had stood with my husband looking up at the painted name upon the bows, who had flushed red when Mary turned her teasing eyes upon him. From New England, as were my husband and myself, something under thirty, well set up, unlike most sailors clean shaven, with a pleasant face and smooth black hair, fair skinned beneath the tan. Quick with a joke or a piece of repartee. But rough enough; his ill manners revolted me, sprawling in his place, shovelling up his food with the blade of his knife, tilting the plate to tip the gravy into his mouth. My husband said at last: ‘There’s a woman present. Need you eat like a dog?’

‘A dog would bend over and lap up the food,’ said Richardson; adding a placatory, ‘Sir. After all, would he not?’

‘We had a little dog at home,’ I said, ‘would take a mouthful off the tip of a fork; and very daintily.’

‘I am saying that Mr Richardson is not a dog,’ said my husband.

‘What sort of dog would you be, Mr Richardson, if you must be a dog at all? I think
I’d
be our little dog at home, spoilt pet that he was.’

‘Well, and if you’d feed me tidbits from a fork, Mrs Briggs, so would I.’

‘You are talking rubbish,’ said my husband. ‘What meaningless nonsense is this, in the mouths of grown-up people?’

‘But it’s what’s in the mouth of a little pet dog,’ I said, meaning only to speak lightly.

He got up and edged his way out from between the bench and the table, both clamped to the floor, and went off up the companion-way. Richardson rose to his feet also, leaving his knife and fork straddled across his plate. ‘Now, Mrs Briggs, we’ve deprived ourselves, like children, of our pudding.’

I knew I’d been childish and silly; my heart failed within me. ‘It was my fault,’ I said sadly; and I thought, A fine beginning! and knew that I should never be fit for a captain’s wife, any more than I could become the figurehead of a beautiful great ship, carrying her forward with my raised head and my backward blowing locks, across the shining sea… A wooden figurehead with backward blown curls and no heart to suffer despair and dread… The care fell away from me, I felt the bright sun in my eyes and the fresh salt spray across my face, I lifted my head… Mr Richardson’s voice said into my far-away thoughts, ‘Mrs Briggs, forgive me Ma’am, I’ll not say it again, I mean you no offence. I had not recognised it till this moment, but—you are a very beautiful lady.’

A very beautiful lady. Honey Mary’s words dragged me back to crude reality. A woman’s good looks need not make her bad, I had said to her; and she had answered me: ‘You don’t know men.’

Failure then; failure. The steward came in with a steaming roll of plum duff but I motioned to the empty table and crept back to my cabin. Not much later than noon, and all the day to crawl through and then—the night. I sat down at the melodeon and tried to understand the black patches of the notes, blurred to greyness by unshed tears. How can I please him, why did he marry me? What am I to do with my life? I should have a child, I supposed, should have children; but I knew myself to be not fitted yet to undertake the care of a child, of a fragile creature that would be at the mercy of these hands so narrow and white with their long fingers and pretty oval nails—yet so strangely inept. I prayed with all my heart that I need not yet be exposed to so frightening a role, so far beyond my capacities. At home they had constantly told me what a fool I was. I thought I was not a fool; but I knew that I was foolish. I was too foolish and dreaming to wish to bear the heavy responsibility of bringing up a child. I was still a child myself. And yet what else was there for me?