by John Barth
“Ah nay, ye dare not,” Susan warned. “Let fall but a word of what I’ve said, and we’re all dead men.”
“In that event,” the Laureate said after some reflection, “he shall not have the honor of my visit. Aye, the boor shall learn how decent folk shun such beasts as he!”
“B’m’faith!” commented Bertrand. “ ’Tis a fearsome punishment you exact, sir!”
Susan straightway recommenced her weeping. “ ’Tis done, then!” she declared. “ ’Tis o’er and done!”
“How’s that?” the poet inquired. “What’s done?”
“I,” the maid replied, “for when I saw your face and heard o’ your wondrous office, my poor brain hatched a plan. But what I hatched, ye’ve scotched, and ’tis done for Susan Warren.”
“A plan, you say?”
The swine-girl nodded. “To make my escape and be rid o’ that antichrist my master.”
“Pray lay it open, then, that we might judge it.”
“I know,” she said, “that some time past, when Captain Mitchell found this newest prey, I guessed my phials would soon become a burthen to him and so, while feigning to eat the whole of the contents, in fact I laid by a little every time and saved it in my snuffbox. Of each phial I ate a grain less and saved a grain more, till now I’ve near a month’s worth in reserve; and I have farther hid my one good dress, that Mrs. Sissly gave me to be flogged in. Now I have it privily that Father’s indenture is run out, and Mr. Spurdance his master hath given him twenty acres of his own to till on the Eastern Shore. If I can flee from this evil house I shall make my way to my father’s farm and hide myself till my cure is done; then he and I shall seek passage back to London.”
“Brave plans!” said Bertrand, whose sympathy the swine-maid’s plight had won entirely. “What can we do to aid ye?”
“Ah, sir!” wept Susan, still addressing Ebenezer. “These brave plans were fond indeed, should I simply strike out on the road. The law goes hard on fleeing servants, and my back thirsts not for farther stripes. What I require to fly this sink o’ Hell fore’er is but a sum of silver, that ye would not miss; I have found a boatman that will risk flogging to sail me o’er the Bay, but he demands his fare. Two pounds, my lord!” she cried, and greatly disconcerted the Laureate by falling to her knees before him and embracing his legs. “Two pounds will send me safe to my dear father! Oh, sir, refuse me not! Think of someone ye love in these sad straits—thy sister, or some sweetheart!”
“ ’Fore God, I would ’twere in my power to help you,” Ebenezer said, “but I am penniless. I’ve but this trifling ring, here, made of bone—”
He drew it ruefully from his shirt to show his poverty, but at sight of it Susan jumped up and cried, “God save us! Whence came that ring?”
“I may not tell,” the poet replied. “Why doth the sight of it alarm you?”
“No matter,” said Susan, and clutched at the fishbone ring that hung still on its thong about the poet’s neck. “It hath a certain value in the market, and methinks the boatman will accept it for his fare.”
But Ebenezer hesitated. “ ’Twas a kind of gift,” he said. “I am loath to part with’t…”
“Christ! Christ!” Susan wailed. “Ye will refuse me! Look ye hither, how that fiend abuses me! Will ye send me back for more?”
She raised her tattered skirt above her knees and displayed two legs which, wealed and welted though they were, had not been spoiled by the physic that had uglified the rest of her. Indeed, they were quite fetching legs, the first Ebenezer had seen since that day aboard the Cyprian.
“Ah, well, thou’rt still a woman,” Bertrand said appreciatively, “and a good wench sits upon her own best argument.”
This observation brought fresh tears from Susan and a scathing look from Ebenezer.
“I have seen harlotry enough,” she declared, “and the boatman is a man too old to care.”
“Indeed?” the valet smiled. “But my master and I are not.”
“Hold thy tongue!” the poet commanded. Susan came up to him, and more than ever he was moved by her strange story and her resemblance to Joan Toast.
“Ye’d not see me beat again, would ye, sir?” They were in sight of a house by this time, whose lamplit windows shone across the tobacco-fields. “Yonder there is Captain Mitchell’s house; he’ll take you in right gladly as his guest, but me he will whip privily ‘till he wearies of the sport.”
Ebenezer had some difficulty with his voice. “ ’Twere in sooth a pity,” he croaked.
“I shan’t allow it,” the girl said softly. “If the man I loathe most in the world hath his will o’ me whene’er it please him, shall I deny the man who delivers me from all my pain?” She fingered the fishbone ring and smiled. “Nay, ’twere a sin if my savior took not his entire pleasure this very night, ere I fly.”
“Prithee, say no farther,” Ebenezer answered. “My conscience would not rest were I to stand ’twixt you and your loving father. You shall have the ring.” He slipped the rawhide thong over his head and presented her with the ring of Quassapelagh. To his mild annoyance the swine-maiden did not immediately melt with gratitude; indeed, her bearing stiffened as she took the gift, and her smile showed a certain bitterness.
“Done, then,” she said, and stuffed the ring and lanyard into a pocket of her dress. They were at the edge of the woods, by a tobacco-field; the moon rising over the mouth of the river whitened their faces and the flanks of the hogs that rooted idly in the green tobacco. Susan stepped into the field, laid her staff on the ground between the rows, and turned to face them with arms akimbo.
“Now, Master Laureate of Maryland,” she said, “come swive me in the sot-weed and have done with’t.”
The poet was shocked. “ ’Sheart, Mrs. Warren, you misconstrue my gesture!”
“Oh?” She tossed her uncombed hair back from her face. “Anon, then, in the haymow by the barn? Surely thou’rt not the sort that wants a bed!”
Ebenezer stepped forward to protest. “I beg of you, madam—”
“ ’Tis not your servant’s presence puts ye off, now, is it?” she said mockingly. “Ye look the type that swives in broad daylight, let watch who will! Would it please ye better if I feign a rape?”
“God save us,” Bertrand said, “the jade hath spirit! Plague take the hour I lost my fishbone ring!”
“Enough!” the Laureate cried. “I have no designs upon your person, Mrs. Warren, nor do I want reward of any sort, save that you join your father and throw off the vicious craving that hath whored you. To lay with women is contrary to my vows, and to set a price on charity is an insult to my principles.”
This gave the swine-maid pause; she folded her arms, turned her head away, and dug a pensive toenail in the dirt.
“My master is a sort of rhyming priest,” Bertrand explained quickly. “The bishop, don’t you know, of all the poets. But ’tis a well-known fact the priest’s vows are not binding on his sexton, nor do my master’s principles extend to me—”
“Is’t principle that makes your master scorn me?” Susan interrupted, and though her question was addressed to Bertrand it was Ebenezer she regarded. “Or is’t my sorry state that makes him moral? He’d sing a lustier tune, methinks, were I free of whip-scars and the smell o’ pigs, and young and sprightly as the girl Joan Toast.”
“What name is thus?” cried the poet. “Dear God, I thought you said Joan Toast!”
Susan nodded affirmatively, once more dissolving into tears. “That is the girl I spoke of, that anon will be my master’s newest sister, and the death of Susan Warren.”
Ebenezer appealed to his valet. “ ’Tis too fantastic, Bertrand!”
“I scarce can credit it myself, sir,” Bertrand said. “Yet there is that passing likeness, that her tale explains.”
“ ’Tis not so strange,” the girl said testily. “For all her sweet airs, this Joan Toast was a simple whore in London not long since, and many’s the man hath known her.”
“I forbid
you to speak thus!” the Laureate ordered. “I hold a certain reverence for Joan Toast; she hath a strange deep home in me, for reasons known to none besides ourselves. Where is she, for the love of God? We must preserve her from this Mitchell!”
“How can we?” Bertrand asked. “We’ve neither weapons nor money.”
Ebenezer grasped the swine-maiden’s arm. “You must take her with you to your father’s farm!” he said. “Tell her your tale and explain the peril she is in. Once I arrive at Malden I shall fetch her there—”
“And marry her?” asked Susan with some bitterness. “Or pimp for her instead, and keep your vows?”
The Laureate blushed. “ ’Tis not the time for speculations and conjectures!”
“In any case I cannot take her,” Susan said. “I’ve fare for but a single passage.”
“We soon can alter that!” Bertrand laughed, and leaped to pinion both her arms. “Snatch back the ring, sir, while I hold her!”
“Pig!” she squealed. “I’ll have your eyes out!”
“Nay, Bertrand,” Ebenezer said, “let her go.”
“This jade?” cried Bertrand, laughing at her attempts to wriggle free. “She’s but a hedge-whore, sir! Snatch the ring!”
Ebenezer shook his head sadly. “Hedge-whore or no, I gave it to her in all good faith. Besides, we do not know this boatman, nor where Joan Toast may be. Release her.”
Bertrand let go the swine-girl’s arms and gave her a pinch. She squealed another curse, picked up her staff, and let fly at him a blow that, had he not jumped clear of it, would have cost him ribs.
“Ye’ll call me a hedge-whore!” she said fiercely, and ran him off some way across the field. Ebenezer, much more concerned about Joan Toast than about either of them, set off with a thoughtful frown toward the house.
“Your servant is a lecherous swine,” said Susan, catching up to him a moment later. She brushed her hair back with her hand and prodded the pigs. “I beg your pardon for running him off.”
“He had it coming,” the poet said distractedly.
“And I thank ye for respecting a gift, e’en though ’twas not all charity that moved ye. Ye must think highly of this wench Joan Toast.”
“I will do anything to save her,” Ebenezer said.
“I think I can arrange it with the boatman,” Susan said. “He hath no use for me, but a fresh young tart like Joan hath ways to please the feeblest.”
“Nay, I shan’t allow it! I shall find some other way. Where is she?”
The swine-girl did not know where Joan Toast lived, but said she called on Captain Mitchell nightly. “This very night he plans to give her opium, with my help. I shall catch her ere she comes in, if ye wish, and send her to some privy place to meet ye.”
Ebenezer agreed wholeheartedly to this plan, and though he quailed at the prospect of meeting Captain Mitchell, Susan persuaded him to join the planter at supper. “The Devil himself can play the gentleman,” she said. “All men are welcome at the Captain’s board, and belike he’ll change your rags for something better when he hears your tale. I’ll send ye word when Joan Toast is well hid, and lead ye to her ere I set out for my father’s.”
“Done!” the poet exclaimed, well pleased. “I cannot fathom why she is in Maryland, but I shall rejoice to see her!”
“And prithee, are ye sure she’ll feel the same?” the swine-maid teased. “Can any tart believe thou’rt still a virgin?”
“That doth not matter,” Ebenezer declared. “No man would think me Laureate, either, in this condition, yet Laureate I am, and virginal as well. Marry, Susan, how I yearn to see that girl! I beg thee not to fail me!”
Susan sniffed acknowledgment and they came up to the house, a large but ill-kept split-log dwelling. It squatted amid the fields of green tobacco and weed-ridden garden crops, and the bare earth round it was malodorous with the stools of many hens.
“Methinks your master hath fallen far,” Ebenezer observed, “to be reduced to such a dwelling.”
“How’s that?” the woman exclaimed. “ ’Tis one o’ the finest on the river! Far too fine a seat for such a wretch as he!”
Ebenezer made no comment, but wondered briefly whether to cast away certain verses in his head which praised the grace of Maryland’s dwellings, or preserve them lest Susan’s knowledge prove incomplete. When the swine-girl left him in order to drive her charges back to the barn, he called for Bertrand, who came forth hurling curses after her, and they made their way to the front of the house.
“Pray Heav’n the wench is right about her master,” Ebenezer said, and knocked on the door.
“I would not trust the strumpet twenty paces,” Bertrand grumbled. “The man could murther us in our sleep.”
The door was opened by a fleshy man in his fifties, red-nosed and chop-whiskered, who had nonetheless an air of good breeding about his person.
“Good evening, gentlemen,” he said with a slightly mocking bow. His clothes were fashionable, if seedy, and the excellent gravity of his voice came partly from cultivation, Ebenezer suspected, and partly from a well liquored larynx. Despite their wretched appearance he was as hospitable as Susan had predicted: he introduced himself as Captain William Mitchell, invited the visitors into the house most cordially, and insisted they stay the night.
“Be ye from jail or college,” he declared, “thou’rt welcome here, I swear. Dinner’s on its way, and do ye set down yonder with the rest, there’s cider to whet your hunger.”
Ebenezer thanked his host and launched into an explanation of their plight—which, however, Captain Mitchell pleasantly declined to hear, suggesting instead that it serve to entertain the table. The guests were then led to the dining-room, from which sounds of merriment had all along been issuing, and were introduced to a company of half a dozen planters of the neighborhood, among whom, to his considerable surprise, Ebenezer saw the clip-eared old ferryman and one or two others who had stood that day in Scotch cloth on the landing. They greeted him merrily and without malice.
“We looked for ye to join us, Mister Cooke,” one said. “Ye must forgive Jim Keech’s little prank.”
“To be sure,” Ebenezer said, seeing no other position to take. “I’ll grant I look more like a beggar than the Poet Laureate of Maryland, but when you’ve heard what trials my man and I have suffered, you may appreciate our state.”
“We shall, I’m sure,” the host said soothingly. “Indeed we shall.” He then sent Bertrand to eat back in the kitchen and directed Ebenezer to a seat at the dinner table, which made up in quantity what it lacked in elegance. Being very hungry, Ebenezer fell to at once and stuffed himself with pone, milk, hominy, and cider-pap flavored with bacon fat and dulcified with molasses, washing down the whole with hard cider from the cask that stood at hand. He had, in fact, debated for a moment the wisdom of revealing his identity, but since he had already revealed it on impulse to the men on the landing, and since the company showed no trace of hostility, he saw no harm in relating the whole of the story. This he proceeded to do when the meal was finished and all the guests had retired to greasy leather couches in the parlor; he left out only the political aspects of his capture and the adventure with Drakepecker and the Anacostin King, whose safety he feared the tale might jeopardize. His audience attended with great interest, especially when he came to the rape of the Cyprian—his tongue inspired by the rum-keg in the parlor, Ebenezer spoke with eloquence of Boabdil in the mizzen-rigging and the nobly insouciant ladies at the larboard rail—yet when done he saw, to his mild chagrin, small signs of the pity and terror that he thought his tale must evoke in the most callous auditor: instead, the men applauded as if at some performance, and Captain Mitchell, so far from commiserating, requested him to recite a poem or two by way of encore.
“I must decline,” the Laureate said, not a little piqued. “This day hath been fatiguing, and my voice is spent.”
“Too bad our Timmy is not with us,” said Jim Keech of the branded palm. “He’d spin ye one would f
erry ye ’cross the Bay!”
“My son Tim’s no mean hand at rhymes himself,” Captain Mitchell explained to Ebenezer, “but ye might say they’re of a somewhat coarser breed.”
“He is a laureate too,” Jim Keech affirmed with a grin. “He calls himself the Laureate of Lubricity, that he says means simple smut.”
“Indeed?” the poet said, more out of politeness than genuine curiosity. “I did not know our host possessed a son.”
He was, in fact, preoccupied with thoughts of Joan Toast and the swine-maiden, of whom he’d been reminded by Keech’s reference to crossing the Bay. Captain Mitchell apologized to the group for the absence of his popular son, who he declared had gone to do some business in St. Mary’s City and was due to return that night or the following day; it was difficult for Ebenezer to realize that this affable country squire before him was the villain of Susan Warren’s tale, yet there were the whip-scars on her legs, every bit as cruel as those on Drakepecker’s back, and the otherwise unaccountable resemblance between the victims of his passion.
The company now was ignoring him: pipes made after the Indian fashion had been distributed, and the room was filled with smoke and general gossip. Knowing nothing of the crops, fish, rattlesnakes, or personalities under discussion, irritated that his plight had not aroused more sympathy, and weary of the long, eventful day during which he’d been a castaway, a god, a deliverer of kings and maidens in distress, and the Poet Laureate of Maryland, Ebenezer disengaged his attention from their remarks and slipped into a kind of anxious reverie: How would Joan Toast receive him, after all? Where had she gone from his room in Pudding Lane, and how had her fearful dudgeon led her hither? He burned to know, yet feared the answers to these questions. The hour was growing late; soon now, if she were not deceiving him, Susan Warren should send word of his rendezvous, and the prospect was in no small sense arousing. He recalled the sight of Joan Toast in his room and of the girl he’d meant to assault aboard the Cyprian—