Honey Harlot

by Christianna Brand

  ‘You’ve been in Mr Richardson’s cabin?’

  ‘There’s one place the master of a vessel respects. The chief mate is on a near equality. Captain Briggs knows his sea-going manners.’

  But the fear was returning to me, blotting out all else. ‘If he finds you in here—’

  ‘Well, then, come in there and we’ll talk.’

  ‘No, no,’ I protested, ‘he would come back and find me—off my chain… He’d search the ship for me.’

  ‘Well, he’ll not return for a little while. Listen, you can hear his voice; having lost his temper for no reason, he’ll be looking for a reason to have lost it.’ And indeed, he could be heard roaring furious instructions up to the rigging, where all had been peace and order till now. She looked round her. ‘In case we should be caught—where could I hide?’ There was a W.C. in the corner, with a curtain pulled across it. ‘If the worst comes to the worst, I shall dodge in there.’ And she laughed outright. ‘A fine moment when he comes in, all unbreeched, to find a woman there already!’

  ‘Mary,’ I begged, ‘please go—I dare not talk to you.’ But I knew that here was my opportunity; to talk to her, to plead with her, to plan with her how my husband might be spared from the threat her presence posed for him. I begged: ‘Don’t let him find you! Go ashore when we reach land, I’ll find money to help you, you shall have all I own, I have a pin with a pearl in it… Why should you wish to injure him?’

  She sat down slowly in the chair, took my two hands in hers, sat there looking up at me. ‘You still try to protect him?’

  No other thought had come to me. I said stupidly: ‘He’s my husband.’

  ‘Who treats you like a kennelled bitch. And … I know how he uses you—a young creature, innocent, not a tough veteran like me. Why should you care for him?—let him be taught a lesson and he’ll treat you very differently ever after, I’ll promise you that. You’ll have the whip hand then.’

  My whole skin crawled with the terror of discovery, she sitting there so bold and careless, holding my hands in hers, as though she were my friend—a whore of the waterside. But my husband’s voice could still be heard shouting directions. I whispered: ‘What would you do?’

  ‘Well…’ She considered it, easily, swinging the swivelling chair a little bit this way and that, like a child. ‘If none knew but you…’

  ‘I know already,’ I said, and felt the hot flush under my skin.

  That stopped the casual swing to and fro. ‘He told you?’

  ‘I saw his face when he came back from—from you.’

  She shrugged. ‘Anyway, I didn’t mean that. What threat would that mean to him?—you’d never tell anyone, poor little mealy-mouthed girl, and if you did no one would believe you, they’d say you were jealous and without any reason…’ She seemed not to think it disgusting and ludicrous that a married woman should be jealous of her husband’s—filth—in the arms of such a woman as herself; and indeed… She wasn’t like other such women, as I’d seen them down there on the quayside, she was not sluttish and vulgar, she was brilliant and beautiful, a queen. ‘But…’ She gave a little wriggle in the chair, her face took on that look of mischief—of wickedness really—and yet she had the magic of laughter to turn it into no worse than a mischievous naughtiness. She said: ‘No one but these men know I’m here—seven of them, Richardson and Gilling, and the cookboy and the four Germans. They’ll do what I tell them—or, when they come in to New York from their various voyages, how sorry they’ll be! So that if none know but you and I and a handful of men who’ll keep silent—what a threat you hold over him then! You have but to give the signal, and we shall have it spread over every waterfront on the trade routes, before the month is out—the great Captain Benjamin Briggs seduced, brought down by Honey Mary of the New York docks and smuggled aboard for his pleasure during the trip to Genoa and back—and with his innocent young wife aboard, the disgrace of it!’ She clapped her white hands together, bending her face over them, alight with laughter. ‘My honey, you have him by the short hairs! “Treat me fair, or I’ll tell all! Do this, do that, do as I bid you—or I’ve but to say the word to my friends, and they will tell all! It’s only by my bidding that they haven’t already.”’ She caught at my hand again. ‘And—“leave me in peace when I wish for peace—or I’ll tell all.”’

  I coloured again; so crude and outspoken! my ‘friend’—a waterside harlot my ‘friend’, and a crew of men, rough and violent, uncontrolled and in their behaviour licentious—my ‘friends’. And to be hand in glove with them, to make a pact with them… And against my own husband! ‘But, Mary—’ I began…

  ‘No buts,’ she said. ‘It was for him to protect and cherish you and he does neither. Your life will be one of endless misery—Sarah, honey, I mean it!—unless you use this whip which God puts into your hand. You have but to tell him next time he offends you, “If you won’t have more care for me, I shall tell all your secrets.” No need to be rough about it, poor gentle little thing that you are. He seduced me—I seduced him, more like, to teach him a lesson, the tub-thumping hypocrite—’

  I let that go by, I clutched at the word ‘secrets’; I said urgently, ‘The crew don’t know about that?’

  ‘They shall,’ she said, as though it were a promise. ‘I’d kept it to myself so far, for my own ends; a little blackmailing secret may come in handy any time. But I’ll tell them now. Your hold over him would be nothing without that. He could always deny that he’d known of my coming aboard; the other he wouldn’t deny—with all his faults, he couldn’t lie, I think, and anyway his face would flame and go grey and flame again, he’d give himself away.’ And suddenly her hand tightened on mine, ‘He’s coming!’—and she was gone, a whirl of scarlet, out of the cabin, across the floor of the saloon—it was all a short enough distance in all conscience. I rushed after her but in time only to catch a glimpse of the door of the chief mate’s cabin softly closing and my husband’s feet and legs appearing at the top of the companion-way. I dodged back into my own cabin and when he entered was sitting stiffly upright in one of the two chairs. I didn’t wait to know his mood. Strong in my new strength, I said coldly: ‘You find me sitting upright, as instructed. Breathing the nice, foetid cabin air, as instructed. In silence and alone—as instructed.’

  He stopped dead in the doorway. I think he was utterly astonished, he had thought me a thing of whey as a wife should be, discounted my little uprush of pettishness, up on deck, earlier; now was astounded and perhaps perturbed by its persistence. He said: ‘You are behaving like a silly child.’

  ‘If one’s treated like a silly child,’ I said, ‘that’s the way one behaves. You told me to sit in a chair, to remain down here, to speak to no one…’

  The steward came down the companion steps in the adjoining saloon, with a rattle of china and metal to lay the table for the midday meal. My husband closed the door behind himself and came forward into the cabin. ‘I simply instruct you not to be familiar with the crew.’

  ‘Who else is there to be familiar with?’ I said. And I took a leaf out of Mary’s wicked book of mischief. ‘Or are there any ladies aboard, to be friends with me?’

  ‘There’ll be no ladies at all aboard on my next trip,’ he said, ‘if this is to be your behaviour.’

  ‘If you mean you’ll not take me with you,’ I said, ‘I can think of no greater blessing and no greater peace.’

  He sat down slowly in the other chair, leaned his head for a moment in his hands, his elbows on the table. When he lifted his head again his face was very grim. ‘Am I to understand, Mrs Briggs, that you are settling in to a married life of playing the termagant?’

  ‘A chained dog will bark,’ I said.

  The sparks flew from his eyes, his black beard jutted fierce. ‘A dog may be beaten,’ he said. ‘A dog may be lashed into obedience.’

  I had learned some lessons in the past half hour. ‘Will you lash me?’ I said. ‘Is it to be known about the waterfronts of the world that Captain Benj
amin Briggs can’t keep his wife in order without physical violence? Because, Captain Briggs, lay one finger upon me, and I’ll see that it is so known. I swear that to you. And if you think I can’t—’

  ‘Your friends among my crew will work for you, no doubt?’ he said. ‘You waste very little time, Madam. I see now what you’re about.’

  I could not reply; and my silence I think really stunned him, he recognised the impossible—that the threat I made, might really be carried out. He changed tack a little. He said slowly: ‘You’re not the girl I thought you to be when I married you.’

  ‘Nor you the man I thought you to be,’ I said, ‘when I married you. Nor the man my father thought you to be, either. He thought you a decent, good man who would care for his daughter not threaten, within a month of her marriage, to lash her like a dog. Not that my father would lash a dog. He has respect for all things weaker than himself.’

  ‘If you are weaker than I, Sarah,’ said my husband, ‘you give little evidence of it at this moment.’ And he turned away his head. He said, and I think that he meant it, he felt it in his soul: ‘You disgust me.’

  I felt my heart tremble within me, I felt that I had been indeed rough and unwomanly, I felt that I had betrayed my marriage vows of obedience and cherishing. But I remembered Mary’s hand holding mine close in her own, I remembered the recognition that had come to so hardened and experienced a woman, of my wrongs; ‘I know how he uses you,’ she had said, ‘—a young creature, innocent, not a tough veteran like me…’ ‘And you disgust me,’ I said to my husband, ‘and have from the first moment you laid your hands on me, an untouched, untutored girl. Sail without me,’ I said triumphantly, ‘leave your kennelled bitch behind! Some waterfront woman would serve you better than I can; and I daresay will.’

  That terrible grey beneath the weather-beaten tan! The dark, bright eye growing dim with some hidden sickness within him, hands trembling… Who now was the cowering dog? He lumbered to his feet, turned and almost stumbled out of the room and I was left with my triumph alone.

  Little Sarah Briggs, four weeks a bride, from a minister’s home in a small town in Massachusetts—striking out, ugly and vicious at the man she had, four brief weeks ago, sworn to love, honour and obey. ‘You disgust me,’ he had said. And rightly, I thought. Who am I, who is this, who yaps and bites indeed like a cornered cur? If Captain Briggs had come back to his cabin in the next hour, he would have found his wife on her knees at the bedside, sick with repentance and shame, begging help from her God.

  CHAPTER VII

  MY FIRST THOUGHT WHEN I rose from my knees was that I must prevent Mary from revealing to the men the secret of my husband’s seduction. The dinner hour was near; I had time only to scribble a note, ‘I regret what we arranged. Tell no one the secret,’ and even as I wrote I heard my husband and Gilling come down the companion, and had time to say no more. I had hoped that he might come into the cabin so that I could have had a private word with him, but he did not and when I came into the saloon, I saw that he had taken his place at the table; he did not meet my eye. I said to Gilling, ‘May I have one second to speak to my husband in private?’ He shrugged and, starting to whistle, moved away and leaned against the door of Richardson’s cabin. I wondered if Mary were still in there; and he must have wondered too, or known that she was, for behind his back his fingers beat a soft little tattoo against the wood. I sat down in my corner place opposite my husband and said, very low: ‘I want to tell you that I’m sorry.’

  I think that a load fell away from him; he had been uncertain what he should do if I persisted in my rebellion. He said only, however, ‘Very well.’

  ‘I repent, I’ve said my prayers.’

  ‘We will speak of it later,’ he said, coldly, and gestured Gilling to come back to the table.

  The old crushing defeat. I sat with hanging head, pushing about my plate the slosh of meat and vegetables, I felt unable to eat. ‘What is the matter?’ said my husband. ‘Can’t you eat your meal?’

  ‘We’ve reverted to the way Mrs Briggs doesn’t like it,’ said Gilling, with a sneer.

  ‘We’ve reverted to swill,’ said my husband. ‘And I don’t know which is worse.’

  ‘Mrs Briggs hasn’t cooked in a ship’s galley,’ said Gilling. ‘No doubt things are different in a fancy equipped kitchen in New England.

  ‘Time is the same anywhere,’ I said, resentfully. ‘The food is cooked for too long. However, don’t think I’m interfering again, because I’m not. Today, I am simply not hungry.’

  I thought the mate looked a little surprised at this small show of spirit, but I did not care. All I wanted was to get the message to Mary before more mischief was done. When the meal was over, however, and the two men had left, the boy Tedhead remained, messing about in the pantry and then set about cleaning up the saloon. I didn’t know whether or not he would be aware of Mary’s hiding place in the cabin and dared not go to her; I must simply sit him out, I thought, and then go to the cabin. But before he had done, the man Martens came, another of the German seamen, and knocked at my door. ‘Message from Captain, Ma’am. Hammock has been slung for you amidships. If you wanting fresh air, you should going dere. Cap’n says, if you want reading, is book in table drawer. That’s message, Ma’am. So please to coming mit me and I showing you.’

  There was nothing to do but to go with him. I fetched the Bible from the drawer and went up to the deck after him; and as I went, surreptitiously slipped the note I had scribbled, in through the slit of the sliding door of the first mate’s cabin. There was no sound from within.

  So now instead of being chained to a chair in my cabin, I was chained to a hammock on the deck. I would not be ungrateful, for here at least was the fresh salt air, and the sparkle and roll of the ocean, the restless, moving, swirling roll with its upflung white lace ruffles of spray. But, a girl brought up in the country, I longed for exercise, to pace the scrubbed decks with their dark lines of caulking, to revel in the easy balance with which I rocked a little with the rocking of the ship, to stand at the rail and look down sheer into the glassy depths. But I dared not. The brief walk from my tether in the cabin to my tether on the deck amidships was all I cared to risk. Nor was there any addition to my company; the men must have had a word spoken, for they would sketch a salute, civil enough, and simply pass by. And neither was a hammock even very comfortable; I thought that to lie in it would all too possibly be sinful luxury, and a hammock is a difficult thing to sit upright in. Exhausted with the efforts of the past two days, I summoned up a moment of secret amusement at the pass to which my one great outburst of rebellion had brought me. But I was too beaten in spirit even to dream; all my thoughts were concentrated on the effort to get Mary to alter her plan. I knew now that my only duty was to save my husband such trouble as might face him and I was sick with dismay at the depths I had sunk to, in the falling away from those duties I had so lately and freely taken on.

  The next morning passed, a meal hardly edible, the early part of the afternoon. No sign of Mary; no speech with any of the crew. I grew desperate. But at last Albert Richardson came from the afterdeck and approached my half-hidden lair as though to address me. I could not forbear from saying, ‘You’re not actually about to speak to me, Mr Richardson?’

  ‘I have the Cap’n’s permission, Ma’am,’ he said, ‘if I have yours.’ He put on a voice of some solemnity. ‘Captain Briggs thinks it not proper for the Master’s lady to be too familiar with the crew. But the first mate’s an exception in several matters and this seems to be one of them. Besides, I have the advantage of being a married man.’ He ducked me a comic little bow and with evident difficulty smothered a grin.

  I had not realised he was married and I thought back with a vague shame on that dream of the Archangel Gabriel holding me guarded close, in his encircling arm. ‘I didn’t know you were married, Mr Richardson. Is your wife in New York?’

  He flushed and I knew why. ‘Well, no, Ma’am, she lives with her parents in Nova
Scotia when I’m at sea.’ He stood with his hands in his pockets, looking down at me, swaying a little to balance himself against the motion of the ship, and broke into desultory conversation; but both of us I think, were conscious only of Mary Sellers in the background and of the question she posed, and I was sick with anxiety to know whether or not she had as yet revealed my husband’s secret. I brought the conversation round without too much difficulty to the subject of the ship—and so to her re-christening. ‘She was built near your wife’s home, then?’

  ‘Yes, Frances remembers her launching, ten years ago. They called her the Amazon then.’

  ‘Captain Briggs didn’t care for the name? He’s never told me,’ I said carelessly, ‘why he chose the one he did.’

  He balanced back and forth on toes and heels, looking somewhat uncomfortable. ‘I think that… Mary Sellers came up to him on the quay, Ma’am, while we were painting out the old name and I think she teased him into this one from some fancy of her own.’ To my utter relief he said, and I thought with sincerity: ‘She’s a creature of mischief. To be seen with her anywhere near him was an agony to so widely respected a man as Captain Briggs. I think she stung him like a gadfly with her presence until he gave way—just to be rid of her.’

  So Mary had not spoken out yet: for he above all would have known. I suggested, testing him: ‘She could tell ugly tales.’

  ‘No one would believe anything like that of Captain Briggs,’ he said immediately, ‘but she could embarrass him; her presence hanging on his arm—however unwilling he might be—couldn’t be explained away when all men saw it. So he’d promise her anything to get her to be gone.’ He shrugged. ‘He’s not a man to care much what a ship is called.’

  Enormously relieved, I turned the subject a little. ‘We, however, can’t tell her to begone. Not till we reach land. Meanwhile, what are we to do?’