Honey Harlot (17 page)

I turned my head and looked where she pointed. The Mary Celeste lay gently rocking where we had left her—a little further on, perhaps, with the light breeze into her sails. But with no harm come to her. Intact.

Her voice and movement I suppose awakened him from a deep sleep which had succeeded the first insensibility. He began to stir, to come to life. I made no move to go to him. I knew by now that, though he might not yet know it himself, he would rather have this woman with him than his wife.

She cradled him, murmuring endearments, bringing him gently to full wakefulness. But he sat up suddenly, thrusting her aside: got to his knees, with bleared eyes stared about him, stared at the ship still safely afloat. ‘Great God!’ he said. ‘She’s unharmed. And I deserted her.’

‘You were tricked,’ I said.

‘Tricked?’

She sat now, curled like a great, golden cat, running her fingers as a comb through the sea-drenched tangle of her hair, licking a finger to smooth the tawny line of her eyebrows, biting her lips to redden them, to bring herself back to her full beauty in his eyes. She said: ‘That must be it—they tricked you. There was no fuse.’

‘
She
tricked you,’ I said. ‘You saw the fuse. She tricked you into leaving your ship.’

He said not a word; only picked up the oars and began with all his returning strength to row back towards the brig.

A rope ladder had been let down now, to where the yawl might tie up. The brig was under way, only very slightly, but slowly moving on; it made it the more difficult to catch up with her—Mary caught up an oar and rowed with him—and to ascend to the deck. He went first, dragging me after him, she last. He motioned us to stand a little aside, and so faced the men.

Some sense had returned to the crew—they were sick and fouled by their excesses, the deck was running with filth, but they were on their feet, propped against the rails or standing erect—but ready to meet him. Richardson was at their head. His face, usually so honest and kind, now beneath the weather-beaten tan was pale with rage. He said: ‘So—the danger being over, the Captain returns to his ship?’

‘Nothing has happened to her,’ my husband said, one hand to his head, still half dazed.

‘No thanks to her master if it hasn’t!’

‘I’ve been all night unconscious,’ he said. ‘I was tricked.’

Gilling came forward. He stood beside the first mate. ‘And not for the first time,’ he said. He mimicked his own last night’s words. ‘Oh, sir, I’ve thrown in a fuse, we shall all be blown to pieces!’ He waited for no questioning. ‘A fuse unlit,’ he said. ‘To see whether we were led by a man or by some puppet on a harlot’s string. And that discovery soon made. The Captain deserts his ship with the women, leaves his crew to perish—’

‘What disloyalty did I ever show to
you,’
said Richardson, ‘that you should leave me, lying unconscious on the deck to be blown sky high with the rest?’

The men lolled, staring, still sick, speechless but with sneering faces, insolent. ‘He’s right,’ said Gilling. ‘He stood by you throughout. He braved us all, for you. He went down and searched among the cargo, till the fumes took hold of him. And you left him lying, helpless, to die.’

My husband said again, but humbly: ‘I was tricked.’

‘You were bewitched,’ said Gilling. ‘She called to you and you went with her. You left your ship to sink to the bottom and your men to die.’ He looked round the circle of tense, brutish faces, silently watching them. ‘Very well.’ He stood a little j aside, making way for Richardson. ‘The men will tell you who is their Captain now.’

‘
I’ll
tell them that,’ said my husband. He drew himself up, he spoke again like a man. ‘
I
am your Captain, now and till I bring you ashore in Portugal and—unless from this moment you take my orders—clap you all into gaol for mutiny at sea.’

Gilling had stood all this time with his hand to his side. I saw now that he concealed a cutlass there. He took a forward step.

My husband’s jacket lay where he had tossed it before he dived overboard. With one swift movement, Mary had lifted it, felt in the pocket—and the pistol was in my husband’s hand.

The man lunged forward; my husband lifted the gun and shot him through the head. The cutlass fell with a clatter to the deck.

M
Y HUSBAND HAD STOOD
there, strong but humbled in face of the men’s accusations. Now she went to him and stood at his shoulder, as though with her own body to defend him, her brazen curls against his cheek and—I hear now the clatter of that sword falling to the wooden deck—a change seemed to come over him. It was as though, having spilt blood, some scent of it reached his nostrils, as though the beast in him, long too close caged up, broke through its bars. The German, Martens, stumbled forward: he had a hatchet in his hand—they were all in some sort armed, now I saw, in preparation for outright mutiny—and threw it. It missed and embedded itself in the wooden rail of the deck. My husband waited for no further attack but shot again; and again his nostrils flared and his eye gleamed black and bright with the glare of an animal rapacity for its prey; and he laid about him, shifting the pistol to his left hand, snatching the hatchet from the rail, laying about him with that. The men fell back. Martens had only a flesh wound in the arm and staggered back with them. But Richardson caught up the cutlass from the deck and confronted his Captain. ‘You’re mad! Drop the gun! You’re mad!’

All about us the wide, calm sea. The ship, unattended, softly moving forward, veering a little this way and that as the light breeze caught her sails. The swish and slap of the water, very soft against the gently moving hull. Bitter chill, bitter chill, but the sun slowly rising over the rim of the ocean. The decks so smooth and white with their in-curving rims of dark caulking, recently scrubbed and holystoned, now running with filth; and among all the filth a puddle of scarlet with a man lying dead in it. I ran to my husband, I caught him by the left arm, I cried, ‘Yes, yes, drop the gun! No more, no more! You’ve killed a man…’

She left his side, she ran round behind him, got me by the waist, hauled me away from him, swinging me violently round so that I tottered forward and collapsed in a tumbled heap in the stern of the vessel. ‘Leave him alone!’ she cried to me. ‘He must fight now. It’s the only way.’ She ran back to him, picked up the pistol which had dropped from his hand; felt in his pockets as he still stood confronting Richardson, found ammunition, reloaded the gun, stood beside him so that he could snatch it from her hand if he would. Richardson said: ‘Sir—you won’t fire at
me
?’ I remember still the look upon his face. He said quietly: ‘You’ve been injured, you’ve been all night insensible, you say. You’re ill, sir, you’re not in your right mind. I’ve been loyal throughout. Let me help you now.’

‘Drop that knife,’ my husband said, ‘and stand aside.’

Richardson glanced back to where the men now cowered, sick, stupid, frightened—dangerous. He said: ‘If you’ll drop your weapons, I’ll drop mine.’

‘Do as I order you,’ said my husband, ‘or I’ll have your life for it. I am Captain of this ship—’

‘Yes, you’re Captain, sir. Let me act for you—’

‘I will give you no time at all,’ said my husband, ‘to drop that cutlass from your hand.’

‘Sir—’

My husband threw the hatchet. It struck Richardson low in the shoulder, the knife fell to the deck. Mary thrust the gun into my husband’s empty hand, darted forward, picked up the hatchet, stained as it was with blood, gave it back to him. Richardson had reeled back against the deck rail, clasping his hand to the wound, the bright blood spurting through his fingers staining all his dark jacket with crimson. My husband marched towards the huddled group of men, hatchet in one hand, pistol in the other. The two Lorenzen brothers staggered forward each armed with a belaying pin; my husband, with the back of the hatchet, clubbed Volk to the ground. Boz, cringing back with Martens, Goodschaad and the boy, cried out, ‘Enough, sir! Enough!’ and pulled out some filthy white rag in token of subjection.

He backed away, not trusting them. He came to Richardson, half hanging over the rail, the blood still boiling out from the wound. He said: ‘You too? Surrender?’

Richardson looked back at him with bleared, blank eyes. Mary picked up the blood-stained cutlass from beside him and flung it aside. I went to him and lowered him gently to the deck, bunched my skirts in my hand and held them close against his shoulder to try to staunch the bleeding. But she…

She went to my husband, stood directly before him, wound her arms about him. I saw the gleam of the gold cross at her throat.
He
wore no cross of gold; but now as I saw him stand there, stiff and yet without repudiating her embrace, those other images were expunged from my mind. Not Delilah now, with the shorn head of Samson, not Salome with the head of the Baptist; not the tigress with its mate… I saw him stand there, rigid, his head turned away from her as she clung to him and I thought again of that other long torment of the seas.
Instead of the cross the Albatross around his neck was hung…

N
OW FOR WHAT SEEMED
a long time, a silence reigned on the ship. He had shaken off her clinging, she stood by humbly while he walked to the rail and stood staring out to sea. He turned, looked up into the rigging, looked all about him to see how things were with the vessel: took command. ‘Sarah—take Richardson down to the saloon—’

‘He can’t be moved,’ I said.

‘Then get what he needs—’

‘I can’t leave him. I can’t take my hand away or the blood will flow again.’

He said impatiently: ‘Then, Mary—get what she needs for him, from then on he’s in her care.’ She slid away obediently; her skirt, still only half dry, clung, without its petticoats to her slender, curving thighs, he looked after her with a sickness in his eyes. He strode down to where the five men still crowded, backed up against the companion leading up to the poop deck. He said: ‘Which of you is fit to stand trick?’

Boz Lorenzen said, ‘I’ll take the wheel, sir.’

‘Very well. Volkert, deal with Martens’ wound. Ask…’ He would not speak her name but jerked his head towards the companion where Mary had run down to the medicine chest,‘—for ointment, wash the wound with fresh water, bind it up as best you can. Head, go down to the galley and make coffee for all. Then all five of you may bring water and scrubbing brushes and clean up these filthy decks…’

They looked hardly fit to stand. Volkert Lorenzen said: ‘Sir, we’re sick…’ I remembered how my husband had said to Mary that on crude alcohol men went blind, could die.

He said only: ‘Whose fault is that? Get on with your orders!’ The sails were filling out gently with the breeze; he looked up and I knew that he wondered how he should manage if it became necessary to send anyone up the rigging. He moved about the ship, looking her over, reading instruments; when Mary returned—and not until then—went down to the cabin and I suppose consulted his charts. They say that a slate was found with that day’s date and the time of 8.00 a.m. on it, with the latitude and longitude: south of the Azores, six miles distant from their most easterly island of Santa Maria. It was to be the last entry he made; he never entered the notes in the log, nor indeed touched the log again.

Richardson’s wound was very bad. I made him as comfortable as I might, lying on the deck—calling to the men to swab first all round where he lay. Mary had brought a pillow and a rug from the cabin. She helped me—none too tenderly, I thought—to free his arm from the rough dark jacket and now I could find the exact situation of the wound, the hatchet having cut in deep and wide, impeded from doing even greater damage by the thickness of the coat sleeve; I exerted all the pressure that I could, with dampened cloths. In all my life I had never done such work; as in everything done with my hands, I was clumsy and inept, I daresay, but he looked up at me out of his blur of half-consciousness and said, ‘You are so sweet!’ In all my life, no such words had ever been spoken to me before. If there is left in me any remnant of the heart I once had—I treasure them there. ‘You are so sweet!’ The kindest words, almost the only kind words, ever spoken to me by any woman or any man. Mary, yes, in the days now gone; but always only out of pity. I know that in Richardson—as the blood welled up from his severed artery, so those words welled up out of his blurred consciousness, from gratitude and love.

I had given no thought to my appearance—damp, draggled, my hands rubbed raw by the work at the oars, my hair all unloosed and hanging in dank strands about my face; and, if I had had time to think of it, shaking from the cold. But Mary… In her few minutes while she went through the medicine chest, she had found time evidently to dart into her cabin, comb out her hair, wash her hands, mop over her face. Now, duty done, she retired completely for half an hour or more: returned as groomed and exquisite as ever I had seen her, in a different dress, a dress of a clear, bright pink, with the inevitable scrolls of white; with her creamy bosoms thrusting up from the blue-white of the lacy bodice, hair set to perfection, the damp locks drying into their orderly disorder of curls. Her little pink boots picked their way delicately through the filth which the men languidly swabbed away, now and then tumbling forward over their scrubbing brushes as though they had not strength to remain on all fours. Every time a man fell, my husband would cry out a rough command; and, shuddering, they would pull themselves together again. The boy, Head, said at last, clambering to his feet and staggering forward, hands flung out for mercy, ‘Sir—my eyes are all stinging and misty, I can’t see.’

‘Whose fault is that?’ said my husband. ‘Get back to your work.’

I looked up from my task and saw that the eyes were terribly red, the eyelids inflamed. I said: ‘I can leave Richardson now for a moment. If I could bathe his eyes—’

‘Leave him alone,’ said my husband, ‘to get on with his work.’

‘I can’t see,’ said the boy. ‘I can’t see to do the work.’

‘Then feel your way about,’ said my husband. ‘If you’re blind—you blinded yourself. If there’s filth to clear up—you created the filth. Get on with it!’