by Wilbur Smith
She choked and coughed at the sting of the liquor, but then a marvellous glow spread through her, to her toes and fingertips. He sat beside her, stroked her hair and spoke to her softly, telling her how pretty she was, what a good girl, and how he had missed her. Lulled by the warmth in her belly and his mesmeric voice she leaned her head on his chest. He lifted the hem of her nightdress over her head and she wriggled out of it. Then she was naked. In the candlelight her childlike body was pale and smooth as cream in a jug. She felt no shame as he fondled her, and kissed her face. She turned this way and that at the gentle urging of his hands.
Suddenly he stood up and she watched him as he pulled off his shirt and breeches. When he came back to the sofa and stood in front of her he did not have to guide her hands and she reached for him naturally. She gazed at his sex as she slid back the loose skin to reveal the shiny plum-coloured head, as he had taught her. Then he reached down, removed her hands and sank to the floor in front of her. He pushed apart her knees and laid her back on the velvet-covered sofa. He lowered his face and she felt his moustaches tickling the inside of her thighs, then moving higher.
“What are you doing?” she cried, with alarm. He had not done this before, and she tried to sit up. He held her down and suddenly she cried out and sank her fingernails into his shoulders. His mouth had settled on her most secret parts. The sensation was so intense that she feared for a moment she might faint.
It was not every night that he came down the spiral staircase to fetch her. On many nights there was the rumble of carriage wheels on the cobbled streets below Louisa’s window. She blew out her candle and peeped through the curtains to watch Mijnheer van Ritters’ guests arriving for another banquet or fashionable soirée. Long after they had left she lay awake, hoping to hear his footstep on the staircase, but she was usually disappointed.
For weeks or even months at a time he was gone, sailing on one of his fine ships to places with strange and evocative names. While he was gone she was restless and bored. She found that she was even impatient with Gertruda, and unhappy with herself.
When he came back his presence filled the great house, and even the other servants were enlivened and excited by it. Suddenly all the waiting and pining were as if they had never happened as she heard him descending the staircase and leaped from her bed to meet him as he stepped through the secret door in the panelling. After that he devised a signal to summon her to his chamber so that he no longer had to come down to fetch her. At dinner time he would send a footman to deliver a red rose to Gertruda. None of the servants who delivered the bloom thought it odd: they all knew that Mijnheer had an inexplicable affection for his ugly slow-witted daughter. But on those nights the door at the top of the spiral staircase was unlocked, and when Louisa stepped through he was waiting for her.
These meetings were never the same. Every time he invented some new game for them to act out. He made her dress in fantastic costumes, play the role of milkmaid, stable-boy or princess. Sometimes he made her wear masks, the heads of demons and wild animals.
On other evenings they would study the pictures in the green book, and then enact the scenes they depicted. The first time he showed her the picture of the girl lying under the boy and his shaft buried in her to the hilt, she did not believe it was possible. But he was gentle, patient and considerate, so that when it happened there was little pain and only a few drops of her virgin blood on the sheets of the wide bed. Afterwards she felt a great sense of accomplishment and when she was alone she studied her lower body with awe. It amazed her that the parts she had been taught were unclean and sinful could be the seat of such delights. She was convinced now that there was nothing more that he could teach her. She believed that she had been able to pleasure him, and herself, in every conceivable way. But she was wrong.
He went away on one of his seemingly interminable voyages, this time to a place called St. Petersburg in Russia to visit the court of Pyotr Alekseyevich, whom other men called Peter the Great, and to expand his interests in the trade in precious furs. When he returned Louisa was in a fever of excitement, and this time she did not have long to wait for his summons. That evening a footman delivered a single red rose to Gertruda while Louisa was cutting up her roasted chicken.
“Why are you so happy, Louisa?” Gertruda demanded, as she danced around the bedroom.
“Because I love you, Gertie, and I love everybody in the world,” Louisa sang.
Gertruda clapped her hands. “And I love you too, Louisa.”
“Now it’s time for your bed, and here is a cup of hot milk to make you sleep tight.”
That evening when Louisa stepped through the secret doorway into Mijnheer van Ritters’ bedchamber, she stopped dead in astonishment. This was a new game and she was at once confused and frightened. This was too real, too terrifying.
Mijnheer van Ritters’ head was concealed with a tight-fitting black leather hood with round cutout eyeholes and a crude gash for a mouth. He wore a black leather apron and shiny black boots that reached to the top of his thighs. His arms were folded across his chest, and his hands were covered with black gloves. She could barely tear her gaze away from him to look at the sinister structure that stood in the centre of the floor. It was identical to the flogging tripod on which miscreants received public punishment in the square outside the law courts. However, in place of the usual chains, silk ropes dangled from the top of the tripod.
She smiled at him with trembling lips, but he stared back at her impassively through the eyeholes in the black hood. She wanted to run, but he seemed to anticipate her intentions. He strode to the door and locked it. Then he placed the key in the front pocket of his apron. Her legs gave way under her, and she sank to the floor. “I am sorry,” she whispered. “Please don’t hurt me.”
“You have been sentenced for the sin of harlotry to twenty strokes of the whip.” His voice was stern and harsh.
“Please let me go. I don’t want to play this game.”
“This is no game.” He came to her, and though she pleaded with him for mercy he lifted her and led her to the tripod. He tied her hands high above her head with the silken ropes, and she peered back at him over her shoulder with her long yellow hair hanging over her face. “What are you going to do to me?”
He went to the table against the far wall and, with his back turned to her, picked up something. Then, with theatrical slowness, he turned back with the whip in his hand. She whimpered and tried to free herself from the silken bonds that pinioned her wrists, twisting and turning as she hung on the tripod. He came to her and placed one finger into the opening of her nightdress, and ripped it down to the hem. He stripped away the tatters and she was naked. He came to stand in front of her, and she saw a huge bulge under his leather apron, evidence of his arousal.
“Twenty strokes,” he repeated, in the cold, hard voice of a stranger, “and you will count each one as it falls. Do you understand, you wanton little whore?” She winced at the word. Nobody had ever called her that before.
“I did not know I was doing wrong. I thought I was pleasing you.”
He cut the whip through the air, and the lash hissed close to her face. Then he went behind her, and she closed her eyes and tensed every muscle in her back, but still the pain of the stroke defied her belief and she shrieked aloud.
“Count!” he ordered, and through white, quivering lips she obeyed.
“One!” she screamed.
It went on and on without pity or respite, until she fainted. He held a small green bottle under her nose and the pungent fumes revived her. Then it started again.
“Count!” he ordered.
At last she was able to whisper, “Twenty,” and he laid the whip back on the table. He was loosening the strings of his leather apron as he came back to her. She hung on the silk ropes, unable to lift her head or support herself. Her back, her buttocks and the tops of her legs felt as though they were on fire.
He came up behind her, and she felt his hands on her lower
body, drawing her red, throbbing buttocks apart. Then there was a pain more dreadful than any that had gone before it. She was being impaled in the most unnatural way, ripped apart. Agony tore through her bowels, and she found fresh strength to scream and scream again.
At last he cut her down from the tripod, wrapped her in a blanket and carried her down the staircase. Without another word he left her sobbing on the bed. In the morning when she tottered to the cubicle and sat on the commode she found that she was still bleeding. Seven days later she had still not healed completely, and another red rose was delivered to Gertruda. Trembling and weeping quietly, she climbed the staircase to answer his summons. When she entered his chamber the tripod stood in the middle of the floor and, once again, he wore the hood and apron of the executioner.
It took months for her to gather her courage, but at last she went to Elise and told her how Mijnheer was treating her. She lifted her dress and turned to show the welts and stripes across her back. Then she bent over and showed her the torn, festering opening.
“Cover yourself, you shameless strumpet,” Elise shouted, and slapped her cheek. “How dare you make up filthy lies about such a great and good man? I shall have to report you to Mijnheer for this, but in the meantime I will tell Stals to lock you in the wine cellar.”
For two days Louisa crouched on the stone floor in a dark corner of the cellar. The agony in her lower belly was a fire that threatened to consume her very soul. On the third day a sergeant and three men of the city watch came to fetch her. As they led her up the stairs to the kitchen yard she looked for Gertruda, Elise or Stals but there was no sign of them or any of the other servants.
“Thank you for coming to rescue me,” she told the sergeant. “I could not have borne it another day.” He gave her an odd enigmatic glance.
“We searched your room and found the jewellery you had stolen,” he said. “What terrible ingratitude to a gentleman who treated you so kindly. We shall see what the magistrate has to say to you.”
The magistrate was suffering from the effects of the previous evening’s overindulgence. He had been one of fifty dinner guests at Huis Brabant whose cellars and table were famous throughout the Low Countries. Koen van Ritters was an old friend, and the magistrate glowered at the young female prisoner arraigned before him. Koen had spoken to him about this hussy after last night’s dinner, while they puffed on their cheroots and finished off a bottle of fine old cognac. He listened impatiently as the sergeant of the watch gave evidence against her, and laid before the magistrate the package of stolen jewellery that they had found in her room.
“Prisoner is to be transported to the penal colony in Batavia for life,” the magistrate ordered.
Het Gelukkige Meeuw was lying in the harbour, almost ready to sail. They marched Louisa from the court room directly to the docks. At the top of the gangplank she was met by the head gaoler. He entered her name in the register, then two of his men locked leg irons on her ankles and shoved her down the hatchway to the gundeck.
Now almost a year later the Meeuw lay at anchor in Table Bay. Even through the thick oaken planking Louisa heard the hail, “Longboat with supplies. Permission to hook on?”
She roused herself from her long reverie, and peeped through the chink in the joint of the port-lid. She saw the longboat being rowed towards the ship by a mixed crew of a dozen black and white men. There was a big, broad-shouldered ruffian standing in the bows, and she started as she recognized the man at the tiller. It was the young one who had asked her name and thrown the fish to her. She had fought for possession of that precious gift, then divided it with her little blade and shared it with three other women. They were not her friends, for there were no friends aboard this ship, but early in the voyage the four had forged a pact of mutual protection for survival. They had gobbled down the fish raw, watchful of the other starving women who crowded round them, waiting for an opportunity to snatch a scrap.
She remembered, with longing, the sweet taste of the raw fish now as she watched the heavily laden longboat moor against the side of the ship. There was a hubbub of banging and shouting, the squeal of sheave blocks and more shouted orders. Through the chink she watched the baskets and boxes of fresh produce being swung on board. She could smell the fruit and the newly picked tomatoes. Saliva flooded her mouth, but she knew that most of this bounty would go to the officers’ mess, and what remained to the gunroom and the common seamen’s kitchen. None of it would find its way down to the prison decks. The convicts would subsist on the weevily hard biscuit and the rotten salt pork, crawling with maggots.
Suddenly she heard someone banging on one of the other gunports further down the deck, and a masculine voice from outside called softly but urgently, “Louisa! Is Louisa there?”
Before she could answer, some of the other women howled and shouted back, “Ja, my dottie. I am Louisa. Do you want a taste of my honey-pot?” Then there were shrieks of laughter. Louisa recognized the man’s voice. She tried to shout to him above the chorus of filth and invective, but her enemies swamped her with malicious glee and she knew he would not hear her. With rising despair she peered through her peephole, but the view was restricted.
“I am here,” she shouted in Dutch. “I am Louisa.”
Abruptly his face rose into her view. He must have been standing on one of the thwarts of the longboat that was moored below her gunport.
“Louisa?” He put his eye to the other side of the chink and they stared at each other from a range of a few inches. “Yes.” He laughed unexpectedly. “Blue eyes! Bright blue eyes.”
“Who are you? What is your name?” On impulse she spoke in English, and he gaped at her.
“You speak English?”
“No, you weak-wit, it was Chinese,” she snapped back at him, and he laughed again. By the sound of him he was overbearing and cocky, but his was the only friendly voice she had heard in over a year.
“It’s a saucy one you are! I have something else for you. Can you get this port-lid open?” he asked.
“Are any of the guards watching from the deck?” she asked. “They will have me flogged if they see us talking.”
“No, we are hidden by the tumble-home of the ship’s side.”
“Wait!” she said, and drew the blade from her pouch. Quickly she prised out the single shackle that still held the lock in place. Then she leaned back, placed both bare feet against the port-lid and pushed with all her might. The hinges creaked, then gave a few inches. She saw his fingers at the edge and he helped to pull it open a little wider.
Then he thrust a small canvas bag through the opening. “There is a letter for you,” he whispered, his face close to hers. “Read it.” And then he was gone.
“Wait!” she pleaded, and his face appeared in the opening again. “You did not tell me. What’s your name?”
“Jim. Jim Courtney.”
“Thank you, Jim Courtney,” she said, and let the port-lid thump shut.
The three women crowded round her in a tight circle of protection as she opened the bag. Quickly they divided up the dried meat and the packets of hard biscuit, and gnawed at the unappetizing fare with desperate hunger. When she found the comb tears came to Louisa’s eyes. It was carved from dappled honey-coloured tortoiseshell. She stroked it through her hair, and it glided smoothly, not pulling painfully like the ugly hand-whittled thing she had been reduced to. Then she found the file and the knife wrapped together in a scrap of canvas. The knife was horn-handled, and the blade, when she tested it on her thumb, was keen, a fine weapon. The sturdy little file had three cutting edges. She felt a lift of hope, the first in all those long months. She looked down at the irons on her ankles. The skin beneath the cruel bonds was calloused.
Knife and file were invaluable gifts, but it was the comb that touched her deepest. It was an affirmation that he had seen her as a woman, not as gaol dregs from the slums and the gutter. She rummaged in the bottom of the bag for the letter he had promised. It was a single sheet of cheap paper,
folded cunningly to form its own envelope. It was addressed to “Louisa” in a bold but fair hand. She unfolded it, careful not to tear it. It was in poorly spelt Dutch, but she was able to make out the gist of it.
Use the file on your chains. I will have a boat under the stern tomorrow night. When you hear the ship’s bell strike two bells in the middle watch, jump. I will hear the splash. Have courage.
Her pulse raced. At once she knew that the chances of success were negligible. A hundred things could go wrong, not least a musket ball or a shark. What mattered was that she had found a friend and with it new hope of salvation, no matter how remote. She tore the note into shreds and dropped them into the reeking latrine bucket. None of the guards would try to retrieve it from there. Then she crept back under the cannon, into the darkness that was her only privacy, and sat with her legs folded under her so she could easily reach the links of her leg irons. With the first stroke of the little file she cut a shallow but bright notch and a few grains of iron filtered down to the deck. The shackles had been forged from untempered steel of poor quality but it would take time and heart-breaking perseverance to cut through a single link.
“I have a day and a night. Until two bells in the middle watch tomorrow night,” she encouraged herself, and laid the file into the notch she had already cut. At the next stroke more iron filings dusted the deck.
The longboat had been relieved of the heavy load of produce and now she rode lightly. Mansur was at the tiller, and Jim gazed back over the stern as he rowed. Every now and again he grinned as he went over in his mind the brief meeting with Louisa. She spoke English, good English, with only a touch of a Dutch accent, and she was spirited and quick-witted. She had responded swiftly to the circumstances. This was no dull-witted lump of gaol-bait. He had seen her bare legs through the chink in the port-lid as she helped him prise it open. They were starved painfully thin, and galled by her chains, but they were long and straight, not twisted and deformed by rickets. “Good breeding there!” as his father would say of a blood filly. The hand that had taken the canvas bag from his was grubby, and the nails were cracked and broken, but it was beautifully shaped, with gracefully tapered fingers. The hands of a lady, not a slave or scullerymaid. “She does not smell like a posy of lavender. But she’s been locked up in that filthy tub for Lord alone knows how long. What do you expect?” He made excuses for her. Then he thought about her eyes, those wondrous blue eyes, and his expression was soft and dreamy. “In all my life, I have never laid eyes on a girl like that. And she speaks English.”