Honey Harlot

by Christianna Brand

MY 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…

  CHAPTER XIII

  NOW 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 an
d 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!’

  ‘You’re ill, sir,’ Richardson had said to him. ‘You’re not in your right mind.’ I think now that my husband was in his right mind, that this was his right mind and had been all along: that mind and body, his passions were violent and cruel and now at last were given rein: that out of his belief in a God of vengeance he had battened them down, but now had freed himself of those shackles and gloried in his violence.

  And she also: whose childhood had been spent in the ever-present threat of violence which, in her perverted passion for her own father, she craved: and now found in a substitute, a man perhaps not much less than her father’s age when first those sick longings had been aroused in her. She gave the boy no glance of compassion, came, stepping so delicately in her pink dress, honey hair shining, to my husband’s side. They stood there—a splendid and a terrible pair: he dark, saturnine, black-eyed, black-haired with the short, jutting beard—she with her beautiful body and her beautiful face, with the tumble of dark gold curls and the bright gold cross at her throat.

  Martens came up from the fore deckhouse, his arm in a sling. My husband called to him sharply. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘I voss lyink on de bunk, sir, to recover.’

  ‘To recover from what? A flesh wound in your arm? You contributed to this filth. Get down on your knees and help to clear it up.’

  ‘Yessir,’ said the man. He hesitated. ‘De men is askink—what now, sir?’

  ‘Now you work like galley slaves, having reduced your number and your strength by your own wicked folly, to help bring the ship eight hundred miles more, to land. And there you go to gaol for mutiny.’

  Gilling’s body still lay where it had fallen. There was not strength among them all, to lift the dead weight of it and I, sickened and horrified, was nevertheless too much occupied in my task of saving the yet living, to care too much about the pitiful dead. Now Martens glanced towards it. He said: ‘You killed him—’

  ‘He attacked me,’ said my husband. ‘As you did also. You attacked your Captain with weapons.’

  ‘Our Captain had deserted his ship,’ the man said, sullenly; but regretted his temerity immediately and slunk away back to where the men mopped and scrubbed, and with his one good arm made a feeble attempt to work also. Mary said, low-voiced: ‘If they talk like that ashore—that could be dangerous.’

  ‘They attacked their Captain,’ he said briefly.

  ‘You see what they’ll say—that you had deserted them. You weren’t fitted to lead them any longer. That’ll be their story.’

  ‘I shall have a story to answer it,’ he said.

  I stood up. My childhood. I suppose, rose up in me then—that strict, deeply religious upbringing and the lessons I had learned at the knee of a straight, stern, narrow and godly man—of rightness and wrong, of truth and untruth, of heaven and hell. If my husband lived on with no penance on this earth for his sins, he would die condemned to hell for all eternity. I said: ‘I shall have a story also. I shall tell all the truth.’

  They turned upon me looks of blank astonishment. Mary said: ‘You would condemn him to death!’

  ‘Better to die in repentance than live with the wickedness that’s in him now.’

  ‘For God’s sake!’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t do this?’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘I would. And for his sake, to save him from God’s wrath.’

  He stood absolutely silent, staring at me with those black eyes of his; and in his face I could read nothing. But she—she came at me, running at me across the deck, leaping over the outflung arm of the dead body lying there; and in a moment I think would have had me by the throat. But he came after her and pulled her off me. ‘Let me be!’ she screamed. ‘Let me kill her! Dead men tell no tales. With her out of the way…’

  But he pulled her away and she fell into his arms and laid her golden head against his breast and broke into a terrible sobbing. ‘She’ll not harm you, she shan’t harm you,’ she cried, choking it out, clinging to his sleeves with clenched white hands. ‘Get her out of the way!—what is she but a thing of milk and water, a miserable, half-witted creature, with her cringing little soul…’ With all her magnificent physique, she was as exhausted as the rest, I suppose, by the night we had passed through and the events of that morning. He held her close in his arms, no pretences now, and she lay there and sobbed out her weary heart. I thought to myself for a moment that after all, I was the strong one now.

  With bleary eyes, driving themselves into what activity they might, the men looked incredulously on.

  I left them to stand there, he hushing and soothing her, and turned back to Richardson. He caught me by the hand. He pulled me close. I think all events remote from himself were now beyond his recognition. He mumbled, so that I must bend my head close to his to hear him: ‘My wife …A letter

  ‘You have no strength,’ I said. ‘Give me messages…’

  But he only muttered and mumbled, ‘A letter… A letter…’ ‘I’ll write for you,’ I said. ‘Be patient a moment.’ I went down to the cabin, ignoring those other two, and came back with a slate and slate pencil. ‘I’ll write a message, Albert, a letter, and copy it afterwards and you shall see it. And when you are well—’

  ‘Write, write,’ he muttered urgently. He began to whisper it out. I wrote on the slate. ‘Fanny, my dear wife…’ and waited. He said no more and I saw that he was dead.

  CHAPTER XIV

  I SAT FOR A long time by Richardson’s side, holding his dead hand in mine. I remembered how I had thought of him once—how long ago it seemed!—as a sort of angel, an angel of goodness, Gabriel, sword in hand, fighting off my terrors, drawing me into an aura of warmth and light that shone about him. How I had dreamed of how it might have been, had my husband been such as he: understanding and kind… It seemed a long time indeed since I had been half a child still, a woman only in a new knowledge and dread of the world—dreaming such foolish dreams. Richardson had been no angel: Honey Mary could have testified to that. But he had been kind and true, loyal to his Master; and might have been to me a friend. As I had thought once that I had no friend in the world but a waterside whore—now I knew that there had been one other; and they both were gone.

  The men’s work was half
done, they were approaching the stern of the vessel. My husband stood with Mary, earnestly talking there. He seemed to come to a decision. He strode forward, looking down on the four of them as they crept slowly forward on hands and knees, scrubbing brushes moving almost automatically up and down the fouled boards of the deck; looking up at Boz Lorenzen on the poop deck. ‘Very well. You may all rest now. I’ll take over the wheel. Get down to your quarters, let the boy find you something to eat.’ But as Head stumbled to his feet and, with reddened eyes, now running with pus, began to fumble his way forrard, hands touching the sides of the raised roof of the fore deckhouse to guide himself, he amended, shrugging. ‘Or if he can’t, then another of you see to it.’ They lurched off, a scarecrow crew, supporting one another; one heard the crash and bump as they tumbled down the companion steps. He strode up to the poop deck, caught up a rope and lashed the wheel and came striding back down again. Mary had waited for him. They came and stood over me as I sat at Richardson’s side. Mary said, ‘He’s dead?’

  ‘Dead,’ I said. ‘And murdered.’

  My husband said: ‘He shall have burial.’

  I said sadly: ‘Who is left, fit to say prayers over him?’

  Mary made an impatient movement. My husband said quietly: ‘Stand up, Sarah. It’s necessary that we talk about this.’ I clambered up with a hand on the deck rail, stiff with cold and weariness, and confronted them. ‘What is there to say?’

  ‘The men mustn’t see him, Sarah,’ said Mary. ‘There will be worse trouble if they know that he’s gone.’

  ‘The men not know that he’s killed?’

  ‘While they’re below, we’ll pretend to have taken him down to the saloon, to be nursing him in his own cabin there. No secret that he’s wounded; they all know that. But we daren’t let them know that he’s dead.’

  ‘Take him—? But you can’t keep him dead, down there in the cabin

  ‘I said we must pretend,’ said Mary. But they spoke carefully now, placatingly, they were trying to nurse me into complacency—into complicity. My husband said: ‘I said he must have burial, Sarah. Every sailor faces burial at sea.’