All conversation between the three of us together had to be conducted on the poop deck, for someone must be at the wheel. The ship was increasingly hard to control; there had been bad weather, her sails were torn, the rigging here and there broken and hanging; if by the rigging is meant the ropes and tackle that control the sails; I have said a dozen times I know nothing of all these terms, or have forgotten them. There had been heavy rain, everything above decks was soaked. They were both working up on deck. I took two mugs of hot coffee to them there. Mary left what she was doing and came to the poop deck. She said in the kind way that she nowadays employed to me: ‘You look very tired, Sarah. All this is too much for you.’
‘What I can do, I must,’ I said.
‘We’re keeping her course fairly steady,’ said my husband. ‘If we can only have reasonable weather, we should make land in a week or so.’
I daresay they had made up their minds beforehand that this was the time to talk over the situation with me; had chosen it with some care. The rain had ceased, had taken with it some little decrease in the cold. She had been working—hauling off a heavy cover to get at spare parts, spare ropes I suppose or something of that kind. She wore as she now usually did, clothing left behind by the men—I had known her in heavy weather wear trousers, rolled up to the knee as they had been used to do—her bare legs so delicate and white, and the small white feet padding about the swamped decks; and she almost habitually wore the heavy dark serge jacket, far too large for her, turned back at the cuffs, with her narrow white wrists made all the narrower and more shapely, jutting forth from the heavy folds. Her hair would be tied back with a ribbon, carelessly: gone was the tumbled mane of curls all about her shoulders. If I could have regarded her with less than unspeakable horror, I might have seen that she looked very sweet and comic, like a boy dressed up for playing at being a sailor; and so no doubt he regarded her. As it was, I could hardly bring myself to utter words to her; but now I dissembled. I followed his glance up to the towering masts with their ragged sails ceaselessly flapping in the wind. I said: ‘You must surely be working something like a miracle? Can it really go on?’
‘We’re in the trade routes,’ he said. No doubt he didn’t immediately reflect that so they had said to the crew, setting them out to sea with promises of landfall six miles distant, or of being soon sighted and picked up—when they had sent them out on the heaving night Atlantic in a leaking boat.
‘And if we’re picked up… Sarah,’ said Mary, carefully, ‘we are now just the three of us. We’ve made up a story between us, he and I; and if you will but keep silence, you may save his life.’
‘When we come ashore,’ he said to me, ‘she and I must part: If only to uphold our story, we must part. From then I shall be again in your keeping; and if you’re to save my soul, there may be a long lifetime to do it in. By condemning me now to almost immediate death—what chance will there be?’
I had to play my cards carefully; not seem just to buckle in easily. ‘You talk of your salvation as though you suffer from some sickness and must recover from that before you start a new way of life. Why not begin your repentance now?’
Mary said: ‘He does suffer from a sickness. We both suffer from a sickness. You’ve seen for yourself what it is.’
‘Yes, I have. And I don’t think you will either of you ever recover. So why does he wait for that?’
‘It’s a common sickness,’ she said. ‘We infect one another. Once we are parted—’
‘You’ll never be parted,’ I said. ‘You’re part of one another now, cloven together. You’re like—two demons, possessed: cloven together, one body, one mind, one soul—one soul of darkness; cloven together by the awfulness of your common crimes. You’ll never be parted.’
‘You’d better listen first,’ she said, ‘to the story we’ve made up. You’ll see that if we wish to survive we can never come together again.’
I stood there, swaying with the dipping and rolling of the ship, the wind whipping my hair across my face, whipping the shawl clutched about my thin shoulders, while with one hand I clung to the rail of the deck. He stood at the wheel, his powerful hands controlling the strong wooden spokes, glancing all the while at the binnacle just before him. We must stand fairly close to hear one another through the crying of the wind in the torn sails, the eternal creak and groan of rope against wood, the heavy splashing of the waves up against our sides. She came and stood next to me. She said: ‘Sarah—listen now, carefully…’
‘This is our story,’ he said. ‘And we must each tell it, detail for detail, the same. If you refuse to say actual untruths—well then, say nothing. That’s all we ask of you—say nothing. We can give out that your illness began long before it did, that while all this occurred you were in a high fever, lying sick in your cabin; that we must haul you this way and that, you hardly conscious of what happened. You’ve been very ill; you can say with truth that you were ill. Describe your condition with all truth; only don’t deny that it began sooner than it did. Now—Mary will instruct you…’
So she stood close to me. ‘Sarah—we shall say that all went well with us. But that day—November the 24th it was—you already lying sick in your cabin, if that’s the way you wish to tell it—we were set upon by a privateer from the Barbary coast—’
‘A privateer?’ I said. ‘Do you mean by pirates?’
‘Pirates from the north coast of Africa were common in these waters,’ my husband said. ‘They’ve been very much put down but it’s by no means impossible that a few may still be at work—’
‘One gang was, at least,’ said Mary. ‘For they boarded us and there was terrible fighting.’ She explained: ‘While the yawl was yet afloat, we went down—he and I: thank God for the calm, so that we could leave the ship to herself and contrive these things! We rowed her round to the bows of the brig and there made two great scores, to show where the pirates had rammed us and so come aboard.’
‘You think of everything,’ I said sardonically.
‘So we must, if we’re to survive. Well, then, there was a terrible fight and at last we drove them off. But the crew had been terribly injured, some killed; and the others have since died and been buried at sea—’
‘I was well enough to witness two burials at least,’ I said.
‘Oh, Sarah—for heaven’s sake! And yet…’ She said to my husband: ‘If Sarah were to testify to this—to seeing Gilling buried, your prayers over him—’
‘It’ll be best for Sarah to have seen and known nothing,’ he said. I see him now saying it, standing with his hands fighting the heavy wheel, his long dark hair blown back, his black beard blown back against his chin, his dark eyes fierce and determined.
‘I came back to life, then, and found all the crew gone? No theft committed by the marauders—?’
‘They were fought off, I tell you,’ said Mary.
‘—and only our Captain left conveniently unmarked, and his wife and his woman safe and sound?’
‘I was armed with a pistol,’ said my husband. ‘The men had only wooden clubs, a cutlass and a hatchet—’
‘We can show the mark of the thrown hatchet still in the rail of the deck,’ said Mary.
‘And a blood-stained cutlass.’ Stained with Richardson’s blood.
She answered as though in perfect innocence: ‘It’s a pity that before we had thought of this solution, we’d cleaned the sword and put it away, and cleaned the hatchet.’
‘Why would we have kept them blood-stained?’ said my husband. ‘It was natural enough, when we were still in possession of the ship and trying to sail her, that we should clean away the marks of the fight—we’d hardly remain with blood all over our decks
‘If you change your minds and need some more,’ I said, ‘you can always spill some of mine.’
‘Oh, Sarah!’ said Mary again, as though worn out with protestation against my intransigence. ‘Do you think we would harm you? Didn’t I nurse you back to health? How easily I could have killed
you in these past days. You were senseless, you wouldn’t even have known.’
‘He would have known,’ I said. ‘And that I think even he wouldn’t forgive.’
‘Could you have had a kinder nurse?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘you were preparing the ground for this conversation. Do you think I’m a fool?’ I was a fool; I knew that all too well, I’d been told it all my life. But not in everything.’
‘Well—and so we are having this conversation. And asking you—asking you only to keep silent, to acquiesce in silence to all this careful story which is to save his life. The ship was attacked, the pirates fought off, our men were killed or so wounded that they died. They must fight hand to hand with knives or clubs; he alone had a gun and so could keep our attackers from himself. And he thought it his duty to do that, if he could do it, since he had two helpless women to defend either from the pirates or from the elements once they’d gone. We two women, alone aboard—what would we have done?’
‘So he nobly survived. But—two women: that’s an awkward one! Captain Briggs is known to have sailed with his wife aboard—but not with his harlot also.’ And in a sudden new stab of fear, my hand left off clutching my shawl beneath my chin, and gripped hard on the rail. ‘Of course if when you come ashore there’s only one woman—’
For a moment Mary lost her careful calm. She said, ‘Don’t imagine that I haven’t thought of that, my dear! Then as his wife, he and I—’
‘My wife is known at her home and mine,’ said my husband, ‘and could be recognised by many in New York.’
‘And she recognised by everyone in New York!’ I said. ‘Or at least along the waterfronts.’ I added, savagely, ‘At least if she didn’t keep her clothes on.’
She kept her temper. She said with the laugh that once I had found so bewitching, ‘If you’d taken off your clothes for as many men as I have, my dear, you’d know that such imagined insults have no sting. Nothing matters now, either to him or to me—but that I take them off for him.’
‘But you say you’re to part?’
‘In Portugal, nobody knows her. We shall say that she’s the wife of one of the men—of Goodschaad, he wasn’t well known, he may or may not have been married; if it’s not in his papers, well we can say we were deceived.’
‘Are ordinary seamen allowed to bring their wives aboard?’
‘No, that’s well thought of,’ he said, as though we were all a little gang, working out our difficulties together. ‘I shall have to protest that he brought her there without my knowledge.’
‘Why not simply say they brought—her—aboard without your knowledge?’
‘That might not be believed.’
‘No one knows…’ I broke off. I said: ‘Now that all the men are dead and silenced, no one knows what there was between you two, before we sailed.’
‘One man knows,’ said Mary. ‘Captain Morehouse of the Dei Gratia knows. He can’t have left till many days after we did; we pressed forward our time, I know for certain that his cargo was hardly even beginning to load. He makes direct for Gibraltar. We shall put into a small Portuguese port where none of us is known, Ceuta if we can make it. There I will—say goodbye. I shall return I suppose, at last, to New York and there tell some story of a stolen voyage in a ship I shan’t name. You and he…’ She in her turn broke off, and her white teeth bit into her red lip; she turned her face away and stared out to sea—and for the first time I believed that she believed that all this must really come true. I suggested: ‘To come together again in some foreign land, when all danger is past?’
‘You forget,’ said my husband, ‘that you will meanwhile have had time to convert me back to my righteous ways.’
‘You were a good man once,’ I said, ‘and may be so again.’ I couldn’t forbear to add: ‘You seem less inclined now to tell me to mind my own business. And she strangely acquiescent for one who now owns you so securely body and soul.’
‘We are like the two women before Solomon,’ said Mary, ‘you and I. You’d have him cut in two, so that you might save your share of him for God. I’ll give him up if that will give him life.’
‘Sarah,’ said my husband, patiently, interrupting for the second time as though we two were simply a couple of women squabbling over possession of a man. ‘The world of the waterfronts is far divided, but small enough: the world of sailing ships is a circumscribed world. If ever we two come together again, Mary and I, all that world will know of my guilt. We shall not meet again in this life—’
‘We shall meet in hell,’ said Mary to him. ‘And it will be heaven because you are there.’
He had been all his life a God-fearing man; he turned aside his head and his eyes half closed as though, for all his infamy, the thought of hell fires could still have terror for him. I said, thinking it clever to divert them from any intention of mine to save him by handing him over to justice, ‘Make your assignations with her in the next world where you will. As you’ve said, it’s really no business of mine. But have you thought what you’ll say if we’re overtaken by a ship from New York that knows you both? That knows who she is.’
‘Then we must admit to my identity, of course,’ said Mary, ‘and say simply that the crew smuggled me aboard, he knowing nothing of it. In that surely you can agree, give evidence? You know it to be true.’
‘But will they believe it to be true?’
‘Of course. No one knows except Morehouse, he swore he’d tell nobody. Who else would dream of Captain Benjamin Briggs agreeing to such an arrangement?—and he with a new wife of his own, and carrying her aboard. Then, we can borrow men from her crew, get the brig to the nearest port in Portugal, and in due course I’ll ship back to New York; and there tell the same story.’
‘And you and I, Sarah, shall be man and wife again—’
‘God forbid!’ I said.
He said patiently: ‘Shall at any rate live outwardly as man and wife. In time, if your hatred for me is so great, you may make some excuse I suppose, to return to your family; suffering from sickness, for that or any reason unable to endure the life at sea—I can visit you there between voyages and keep up some pretence…’
I am a figurehead. I am a wooden thing, with the salt seas dashing up, soaking me, drowning me in the old hopelessness, the old helplessness, stupid, vague Sarah, inept and unaware, pushed this way and that by the forceful and capable; with no love to call my own. Torn from the endless small scratches and bruisings of the childhood home, flung among forces too violent for any spirit to endure—and I am again to return to the nest of thorns, with the added stigma of the first and only great adventure failed. I who had looked to love, have found no one to love. I am a figurehead with a heart of wood…
I crept away from them and down to my cabin—to Richardson’s cabin, he who had been kind, who for a moment of dreaming had been like the Archangel Gabriel to me; who had said, ‘You are so sweet,’ before he died. I knelt at my bedside and before it was too late, I prayed—I prayed. ‘Let me not fall back into a dreaming girl. Thou who hast supported me so far in a new spirit and a new strength and a new understanding—put down Thy golden hand, hold me, guide me: let me not fall back into helplessness, into that dreaming girl with no mind and no heart and—dear God!—no soul, of her own. Let me not become once more a lifeless figurehead…’
All the next days, I wrestled with the spirit of that prayer: I fought for identity, I fought for courage, I fought for my own soul so that in the days to come I might fight for my husband’s soul. I had sworn to love him. If I could not love him with my heart, then it no less behoved me to love him as a soul that must be given back to God. As such I have prayed, in this narrow place, for him ever since: before this crucifix.
They spoke to me no more of their plans. I think that, since I made no violent denial as I always had before, they believed that I acquiesced. But at any rate there was no time now for further conversation. He saw that bad weather was coming and that somehow, somehow, he must contrive less sail. T
wo of the sails had been blown right away by now, one was hanging loose. The great sail at the stern of the vessel, the stay sail, I think—he said by some means must be got down. In the rising wind, the ship tossing and pitching, the waves beginning already to dash up, spraying up over the decks, we worked, we toiled, the three of us, all differences forgotten: I doing the least of the work, of course, but darting to orders, dressed up myself, now, in seaman’s clothes—what could one do in thick, fluttering skirts and petticoats? No question of climbing the rigging, lowering carefully, reefing, whatever real seamen might have done. In a haze of ignorance I pulled on a rope when I was told to, wound up, unwound, slackened, released, hauled up again… Until at last, with a huge, rattling, rustling, crashing thud, down she came and lay in great heaped folds sweeping down to the top of the main deckhouse, astern. The brig slackened in her headlong thrust through the water but still sped on, the spume thrusting up and over her bows, the waves now sweeping through the open rails and across the decks, pouring down through any orifice left uncovered. I fled to the cabins and closed and boarded up such windows as I could, but even as I worked a wave would break over the height of the sill to the companion-way and water come pouring down into the saloon. I struggled to the galley, the waves washing over my feet as I ploughed my way along the deck, now climbing uphill, now thrown into a downwards running trot as she pitched and tossed. Down there, I secured all I could, packed food high that might come to harm with the water rising already to my ankles. Above decks, I know that they struggled, those two, with what strength and courage!—forcing obedience from a ship which, with her sails all askew, was now like a wilful horse that finds its reins broken and feels its head. All that evening we battled; but at last the wind dropped and by nightfall she was once more under such control as she would ever be. We changed from our sodden clothing, into something warm and dry; I had brought from the galley food and hot drinks. Exhausted we sat at the table and ate and drank. He had lashed the wheel but now he said, wearily, ‘I must get back to the poop deck again.’
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