Honey Harlot (7 page)

The cabin was strangely comfortless with its two hard wooden swivel chairs, in their fixed positions. I took my pillow from the wide bunk and placed it against the wall and there curled up and tried to force my quailing mind into some sort of order. And yet, poor child—what had it all to do with me? In the whole shocking business, I alone was totally innocent; I had but to say to my husband, ‘I have seen that woman, Mary Sellers, she’s hidden aboard.’ But then—who had first brought her aboard?—and so, with one small spark of compassion ignited a conflagration which, though I could not know it then, was to consume us all.

When my husband returned to the cabin, I had made up my mind. I would take my small courage into my hands and tell him simply that the woman was there, was said to have smuggled herself aboard without the knowledge of the crew, a stowaway: the woman whom I myself had introduced to the ship in compassion for her sorrows, whom I’d seen weeping down on the dockside; whom he’d undertaken to exhort to repentance. I would say no more and seem to know no more than this; would only make it as easy for him as was possible to me, would tell him what the mate, Richardson, had suggested…

… and my mind dreamed off, I saw Richardson’s hand lift my own small tensed hand from the rail of the deck and hold it, comforting; saw how handsome he was with smooth brown, beardless face and how kindly he looked down at me and said that my heart was ‘too vulnerable’… Was my heart vulnerable? If I had met this man before I had known my husband, if I had found someone understanding and kind…? And handsome… I fell into the old dreaming, the old retreat from reality; and in my dreaming mind, that kindly face with its simple good looks grew to be beautiful, I saw him bathed in some sort of light, a guardian angel of goodness, Gabriel, sword in hand, fighting off my terrors, his free arm about me gathering me into the warmth and brightness of that aura that shone all about him—

And my husband’s voice, almost shouting at me: ‘I’m asking you, what are you doing there?’

I violently started, cowering away from him into the corner of the bed. ‘What are you doing on the bunk?’ he said. ‘Why are you crouching there, who has been here?’

I said to him stupidly: ‘Been here? Who could be here?’

He stood before me, foursquare, and his dark eyes, usually so cold and stern, were bright now with a blaze of absolute fury. ‘Why are you on the bed?’

I said helplessly, ‘The chairs are uncomfortable.’

He seemed to relax, his shoulders sagged, it was as if some inner rage had blown up and expanded him and now escaped, leaving a sagging balloon. He said, more quietly, ‘Get up. Get off the bed. The chairs are for sitting in. The bed is for lying in.’

For vileness, I thought, and filth. For cruelty. Chairs are for sitting in—a bed means only a man with a woman. I crawled to the end of it and crept past him and, exhausted, flopped down in a chair. He seemed about to say more but he desisted. I tried to recall all I had meant to confide to him, but I was wordless. I sat there, trembling. He said at last: ‘Remain in the cabin. Occupy yourself,’ and turned and went out again.

I am a dreamer, there is no guardian angel, no fine young man, beautiful and kind. I am a figurehead with the wild waves dashing up across my painted face; and no heart to break…

When he came back to the cabin, his mood had changed entirely. He sat down in the other of the two swivel chairs and pulled off his soft deck shoes. I moved forward to help him, but he said quietly, ‘Stay there.’ He got up again and padded across to the chest, disposed his shoes there neatly, hung up his jacket and peaked cap—came back to his chair and again faced me. He said: ‘Have you reason to suppose that you’re with child?’

‘With child?’ I said, astonished; startled at the mere thought of it. ‘No—no, why should I be?’

‘Why, then, in the middle of the day do you go to your bed?’

I lifted up my hands in bewilderment. ‘These chairs… Simply that the chairs are uncomfortable. I was tired, I took a pillow and sat on the bed—’

‘Why should you be tired?’

This, I suppose, was the moment to have told him. I am worn out, exhausted by the shock of my discovery, by my anxiety for
you.
I wish only to protect you from distress and danger. But—nothing; only the painted face of the figurehead stared back at him. I felt no fear now, neither for him nor for myself, the sudden great upsurge of the waves had left me bereft of emotion, a nothingness. ‘I was tired,’ I repeated. ‘That’s all. The life is new to me, it’s all new to me…’ And you are new to me, I might have said, and the nights of dread. ‘In future, I’ll sit on a chair,’ I said, tonelessly.

‘Come, Sarah,’ he said, and leaned forward and took my lax hand in his own, ‘don’t look like that. I didn’t mean to distress you. I was shocked into imagining… After what I’d seen For once he failed in his usual incisive fluency. ‘I was shaken into thinking perhaps you might be pregnant with a child.’

‘Would that have been a sin also?’ I said, wearily. I don’t know where I found the courage to say it; but in fact, it was not a matter of courage, only of that woodenness of the painted woman with no heart to break.

‘A sin?’ he said. ‘A sin to have a child? Your husband’s child!’ He had dropped my hand but he took it again in both his, leaning forward in his chair. ‘Don’t you wish for a child, Sarah? You would like to have children?’

‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘I suppose I shall, anyway.’

‘Not care? But every woman wants children.’ His eyes went to the bed again, he said, ‘You’re not ill?’

‘I’m not ill,’ I said, woodenly, ‘and I’m not with child, and in future I’ll sit in a chair.’

He had let go my hands, now he sat back, looking into my face. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I was too severe with you, I’ve shocked you. It’s true, I’m not used to the feelings of young girls, at sea we men grow rough and unthinking. It’s a hard life and we know nothing else from our childhood.’ And quietly, reasonably, he began to speak of his own childhood on the waterfronts of Massachusetts that I myself knew well enough, where every man jack was connected with the sea and with sailing ships, with no other thought but becoming a seaman; of the bitter hard-working conditions thirty years ago when, a child of eight, he had first gone aboard to run errands for ships in port; of the first great voyage undertaken with such high hopes, ending two years later in the return, half broken by the work and savage treatment, at the age of sixteen a hardened man… Of the squalor and disease, the injury—I myself must, through my father, have heard of the poverty and distress in families where a man through all too frequent accident, lost all ability to work… ‘There was no room in those days for the helpless and useless.’

‘Any more than there is now,’ I said, inward looking. I was ungrateful for not since our courting days had I known him so kindly and agreeable. He could be so; with my parents he had been very friendly, courteous and in conversation informative and interesting. All he knew was the sea, but of the sea he knew everything there was to be known and spoke of it with intelligence, humanity and much insight into the nature, at least of men. He was as I’ve said in fact my cousin, I had known of him all my life, but he was twenty years my senior and almost always away at sea. To my father, however, who knew in what high esteem he was held, for goodness and Godliness, he was a man to whose care I might be entrusted without a qualm. In my presence, alone with me, his manner had changed, but I think now, looking back, that he was sick with the physical side of his desire for me and could not be natural. Why he chose me I shall never understand. He wished for a wife, those physical desires of his must at last have outlet, his life had been one of abstinence, he could bear it no more. And here was my busy, bustling, competent family, and among them one who seemed docile and biddable—and desirable. Above all, I came, to his long knowledge of them, of Godly and virtuous people, I would worship with him—worship those two gods of his, the God above him and the god within him, who was himself. So, alone with me, his passions yet held in rein, he was sick with longing for me, and once those passions had been assuaged, sick with shame for the shock and violence of the assuaging. From the time of our marriage I had seen little of the man my parents knew—whom all the little town of Marion knew, and all the Massachusetts waterfront and the waterfronts of the world. But now that that man for a little while made his reappearance and conversed with me as though I were a friend, a companion, one who might even sit in the daytime on a bed, without rousing the most violent of nameless suspicions—it was too late. The painted lips of the figurehead opened only to spew back a mouthful of the salt sea.

He would not be defeated. He said: ‘God has given you gifts. You have only to learn. You have only to try.’

‘I’ve given up trying,’ I said. ‘No one lets me succeed.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ he said, still kindly. ‘You can’t think that you always fail.’

‘I didn’t say that I failed,’ I said. ‘I said I wasn’t allowed to succeed.’

‘But I
wish
you to succeed.’

‘Then it was you who failed today,’ I said, ‘when I made my poor attempt to show the boy how to make a few vegetables just eatable.’

‘That’s the cook’s business, Sarah,’ he protested, but gently. I only said drearily, ‘Then in future I’ll mind my own, as you told me to do,’ and added: ‘You see, I
can
learn, if I’m taught my lessons forcibly enough.’

That night in the double bunk he merely kissed my forehead and turned away from me and for once I might have slept; but the life-blood was ebbing back into my petrified heart and my mind a turmoil of dread at what must come. For still no word had been spoken of Honey Mary’s presence aboard the Mary Celeste.

I
WAS YOUNG, RESILIENT,
I suppose—a night of peace brought me refreshment and a new hope. I look back and think that with all my frailties, there was within me always this rather touching courage, this squaring of the shoulders, putting aside of my insecurities and stepping forward again with a new optimism into the path of life—knowing in my heart that it would turn like the way of Hans Andersen’s mermaid to knives beneath my tender feet. My husband was dressed and gone—for once without awakening me; and I rose and washed and dressed, all the time thinking what I had best do next. I had had made, especially for shipboard, a dress of a deep blue cloth, not navy, but a sort of deep moonlight blue, with a white frill at the neck and two bands of white braid running across the bosom and over the tops of the sleeves; the sleeves full, caught into narrow wrist-bands, the waist small and belted, the skirt very full. I had fitted myself with soft deck shoes and my mother’s wedding gift had been a great shawl of softly woven wool, not brilliantly coloured as Mary’s was, but with a sort of warm all-over sheen of silvery grey. I wrapped it now about me and went up on deck.

Now we were three full days out and well into the ocean, and the ship had begun her habitual gentle roll in seas more heavily rolling than those we had so far known. I staggered a little, holding on to the rail of the steep steps up to the deck, lifting my skirts to step over the high sill, almost lurching into a run as I made for the deck rail. Living in the state of Massachusetts, I was not unfamiliar with the ocean, I had as a child found my sea legs and learned that the movement of a ship did not upset my stomach as it does with so many. If I now and again felt a little queasy, two or three deep breaths of the salty breeze restored me to normality. I remember that morning I wondered if the same would apply to Mary, whether all our troubles might not yet be saved by her being confined throughout a rough voyage to her bunk—some bunk, at any rate—with seasickness. I need not have troubled myself with hope: trust Mary to ride any storm as proudly as the ship itself, glorying in the lashing waves of high seas breaking over the decks, surging against the bare feet of the toiling men, crashing up against the sides of the deckhouse, soughing back again into the body of the ocean; rearing their white crests to dash themselves again against the vessel’s sides. I too loved a storm, there was something in it that thrilled me to the soul: but Mary—she was a storm in herself, a storm within a storm, she rode with it, gloried in it as she gloried in all that was dangerous and wild. There can never have been any creature, so utterly without fear. I would have liked to go up into the forepeak—the expressions come back to me as I think over the long-ago days, but I daresay I get most of them wrong—and stand in the very prow where the great bowsprit thrust its length ahead of the body of the ship, over the curl of the water as the clean edge of the bows cleft its way through. Had we carried a figurehead, she would have lain along just beneath the bowsprit, chin thrust forward to meet the spray of those curling waters, but we carried none: I was the only figurehead aboard that ship, with my heart of bleeding wood. But my husband had said that I should remain aft; only, to stay there was to be under the scrutiny all the time of whichever of the men was taking his trick at the wheel, that’s what they called it ‘taking their trick’—or ‘standing their trick’, I never got these terms right. It was Boz Lorenzen’s brother, Volkert, this morning—Volk, they called him. Another of ‘The Breughels’. He sketched me a vague salute and called, ‘Morning, Ma’am!’ I think that their original hostility had lain in their guilty knowledge that Honey Mary was aboard, that they had done me a wrong in bringing her there. Now that I knew the secret, they shrugged off the guilt, perhaps were even inclined to make up to me for it. At any rate, he touched the peak of his shabby black cap and called a greeting.

I picked up my skirts and stepped up the little ladder to the poop deck and remarked to him that now there was more of a swell than there had been so far. He said: ‘You keep pretty gutt your legs.’

‘I was brought up on the seaboard,’ I said.

No doubt they were all in some anxiety as to what was to happen next. He wasted no more time. He said: ‘Vot is mit Mary, Missis? You are not yet tellink de Master?’ It must be obvious to him that the Captain knew nothing so far.