He rubbed my cheek with his hand, then yanked me away from Garth and kissed me hard on the mouth. Garth leaped at him and pulled him away from me, then hit him a mighty blow on the jaw. Conroy fell to the deck, stunned.
"Garth, no!" I screamed.
Five British sailors jumped to the aid of their fallen companion. Garth knocked down two more of them before they overpowered him and threw him to the deck. They manacled his hands behind his back, and one of them struck him across the face with the butt of his pistol, opening a wide cut that bled freely. I ran to him, crying and calling his name, but strong arms tore me away from him and sent me sprawling.
They took two more sailors after that and two strong blacks. One of them was Joseph.
They admired the scars on his back. "This one's been flogged by the Devil himself, mates, and lived to tell about it. Haven't you, mate? Gawd, look at that. Isn't often you get a man that's been tested like that."
Someone, I think it was Doctor Hawthorne, kept a strong hold on my arm as the British sailors marshalled their captives and took them away. They freed Garth's hands long enough for him to go down the ropes to the boats that were waiting to take them all back to the Eureka, then they manacled him again.
I broke free and rushed to the rail to watch. I could see his golden head shining among the rest as the little boats bobbed over the waves. As they drew farther away I could feel the numbness of disbelief settling over me. Surely this wasn't happening. It was all a hideous nightmare. They wouldn't be taking him away, they couldn't.
"Would you like my glass, Ma'am?" The Captain held out his spyglass to me.
Without thinking, I took it and raised it to my eye. I could see Garth more clearly then, being prodded up the side of the Eureka, stumbling when he reached the deck, lashing out with his fists and feet at an officer, who raised a club and beat him around the head and shoulders. He fell to the deck in a heap, and still they beat him and kicked him viciously. As they dragged him away, he was limp and unconscious.
The Captain took the glass out of my hands, but I was hardly aware of him. I still gazed after the Eureka, which had hoisted her sails and drawn up her anchor, and headed boldly into the wind.
"That poor bastard will never live through the day," the Captain remarked with satisfaction. "They'll beat the fight out of him and then they'll beat the life out of him."
I looked at him, horrified. His eyes were gleaming evilly as he stared at me. The snake of fear that uncoiled in my belly felt the true horror of my situation before my brain grasped it. Only Garth had stood between me and this man. And now Garth was gone.
I turned abruptly and ran to my cabin. There was only that small latch on the door, which served to keep it from banging and swinging in rough seas. When I heard his step in the corridor I threw myself against the door, sobbing and panting in sheer panic. Never in my life had I been so terrified. My heart was bursting in my breast and I could taste the fear in my mouth.
He threw the door open, sending me flying across the room.
"I've come to pay my respects," he said, smiling lewdly. "It's a damn shame about your fellow, isn't it? I came to console the little widow."
"Please go away, Captain," I said hoarsely. "I'm all right, I promise you." He was advancing on me. "Just go. Please. I appreciate your sympathy, but—Get out! Get out of here this instant!"
He came closer. I backed away from him. "You don't look all right, Frenchie." He roared with laughter. "You're scared, ain't you? You're afraid of what I'm going to do to you!" He was shouting, his face a distorted mask of animal passion. Saliva ran down his chin.
He unbuckled his belt and ripped open the front of his breeches. I stared at him unbelievingly. "And you're right," he said. "I'm going to teach you some things that star-gazer never heard of."
"Please go, Captain, I beg you," I said, sobbing and incoherent. "I would like to be alone now, if you don't mind. Perhaps we could discuss this later—"
"We ain't discussin' nothin', bitch," he growled. He reached out and touched my hair. I ducked away and tried to run past him, but he grabbed a fistful of hair and hauled me back. I fell on my knees and struggled to rise.
He chuckled gleefully, and placing a meaty hand on my shoulder, he pushed me down to the floor. His ugly, purple-veined bludgeon was raised to strike me out of the stinking, black-matted filthiness of his groin. I drew in my breath and closed my eyes and prayed to faint, but as he came down on me with all of his considerable weight, nearly three times my own, I was horribly conscious. I fought and scratched, but my fingernails made no impression on his tough hands, and when I tried to scratch his eyes he slammed my head against the floor and hit me in the face again and again with the back of his hand. Tears poured down my cheeks and I nearly choked on my own blood.
"Damned bitch. Two-bit French whore," he snarled. "You could be high and mighty and treat me like dirt when you had your pretty boy to stick up for you. Now you don't even have the fancy slave you saved, do you?" He laughed. "Don't think I didn't know what was going on down here, bitch. Now you're going to learn how to take care of a real man. You're going to do everything I tell you to do, and when you finish you're going to beg for more. You're mine now, bitch. Mine."
He had shoved my skirts up to my waist and wrenched my legs apart. His face was close to mine and I could smell the putrid breath and hear his grunts of pleasure as his rotten stump assaulted my flesh.
In desperation I closed my eyes and tried to pretend it was Garth, that Garth and I were together again, making the fine violent-tender love that left us weak and warm and one.
But this raving beast was not Garth. I felt no desire, only revulsion and pain, humiliation and disgust. He heaved and snorted and grappled me, and I sobbed and winced and prayed to God to stop him.
As if in answer to my prayer, he finished quickly enough. Thank God, his kind have no ability to prolong their pleasure. He sat back on his heels and crowed over me. I could feel his rough hands on my thighs, kneading and stroking me. I groaned and rolled painfully onto my side, and pulled my legs up while I covered my face with my arms.
"Eh, we're going to have a lot of fun from now on, Frenchie, you and me." He pawed my buttocks. I whimpered and tried to cover myself. "We've got a long way to go yet, another month, maybe more. Time for lots of fun."
And so it began, an interminable desecration at the hands of this loathesome creature. He violated not only my body, but my soul and my mind as well. I became ugly and timid; I stopped believing in a God that would permit this to happen to me; my dreams were dominated by blood and death.
I was more of a slave than any of those in the hold. Captain Fowler locked me in my cabin and watched me constantly. He refused to allow me to go up on deck for air because once I had tried to throw myself over the side into the peace and silence of the ocean. In a way, the curtailment of my freedom was a blessing: I couldn't bear the looks on the faces of the sailors. Envious, evil, lusting, or even sympathetic, I couldn't tell them apart any more. I was an object to them, and I could hardly tolerate the shame and degradation I felt. The slime and dirt that Josiah Fowler left on me made me unfit for any other companionship: I felt dirty and befouled to my very bones.
Fowler took his meals with me. He was as obscene and revolting when he ate as he was when he satisfied his other physical drives. He even slept with me in the berth that Garth and I had shared. He took me—abused me—constantly, in an astonishing variety of ways. I did things that I hadn't dreamed existed a few months before, and I did them even though they disgusted and nauseated me. After that single attempt to do away with myself, I no longer contemplated suicide. Somewhere in my innermost depths I decided that I wanted to live, that I could survive and would survive. I would do anything. And I had to do everything.
When I protested I got the back of his hand across my face. Sometimes he kicked me with his heavy boots, kicked me as I lay grovelling at his feet like a whipped dog. Garth had been kicked like that, I thought in my agony
. Perhaps Garth survived, and perhaps I would survive, too.
I'm sure no one tried to dissuade Fowler from the course he had taken with me. They were all terrified of him. I wondered if this crazed lust of his was a new face, one he had never exhibited to them before. They saw it and trembled as I trembled, for we all knew that he dealt out death with no more thought than he gave to opening the front of his breeches. Killing was just another perverted pleasure for him. The sailors may even have been grateful for his attentions to me: every moment he spent torturing me was one less he would spend haranguing them. Floggings above deck decreased in inverse proportion to the rise of violence in my cabin.
He broke my pride. I tried everything I could think of to change his attitude, to quell his raging brutishness. I cried, I wept prayerfully, I pleaded with him. To my greatest shame, I even tried to flaunt myself in front of him so that he might see me in a different way, perhaps as a beautiful woman who deserved to be treated more gently. I tried to call him Josiah, and I forced myself to smile sweetly at him and inquire, as dutifully and sincerely as any wife, if he had had a nice day.
"Trying to sweeten me up, are you, bitch?" He laughed unpleasantly. "I'll be damned if you're not tryin' to impress me with your fancy ways so that I'll treat you like a goddamn lady."
"Not at all." I smiled weakly. "I am interested in your work, that's all. You're an experienced seaman, a real veteran, so of course—"
He gripped my face in his hand and twisted my flesh so that the insides of my cheeks were bruised from grinding against my teeth. "A real veteran, am I? I'll show you what I'm a veteran of. Just shut your mouth." He hit me hard, knocking me back against the berth. "Get those stinkin' rags off and lie down on your ugly face." Trembling, I removed my clothes and lay down. "Damn it, I said face down." And then he proceeded to abuse me until I thought my lungs would burst from my screaming.
Just when I thought he had run the gamut of horrible things to do to me, he thought up something new. He came into my cabin one day, pushing a terrified young Negro girl in front of him.
"You had such a good time watching the boys and that bitch back in Dahomy," he said gloatingly. "See how you like this."
She screamed weakly as he leaped at her and threw her down, then forced her legs apart. She had no strength to fight him, but went limp in a moment, and she didn't even cry when he eased himself off her and kicked her viciously in the groin.
"Did you like that?" he demanded, panting. "Next time she can watch while I do it to you," he added for me.
Next time, next time. He kept his promise. That woman witnessed my shame, and so did several others at one time or another—after I had witnessed theirs. He even brought in a small boy, who screamed and vomited all over the floor and bled so badly that I was sure he would die on the spot.
I dreamed of killing him. Not by sword or gun, but by torturing him slowly as he had tortured me, so that life would drain out of him, drop by drop. If I could spill his blood, I thought, I would wallow in it and rejoice.
I fought with all my strength to stay alive. How much that fight was costing me I did not know until one day when I tried futilely to cajole my persecutor into treating me kindly.
"So it's another Josiah Dear day, is it?" He wagged his head and creased his face into a grimace. "You stupid French whore. Josiah has had about enough of you. You stink and I'm sick of the sight of you. Do you want to see why?" He shouted with maniacal laughter and ran out of the cabin, returning in a moment with a small shaving mirror. "That's why!" He held it up in front of my face, smirking with triumph.
I did not recognize myself. I squinted at the reflection for half a minute, trying to make out a vestige of my former self. My black eyes looked enormous in my skulllike head. They were sunken and dull, ringed with purple from exhaustion and the repeated beatings around my face and head. My once smooth cheeks were hollow, and the tone of my skin was dull and lifeless. Lips that had been full and merry were now cracked and scabby. And my hair, my beautiful, glorious hair that Garth had said reminded him of a night sky after a storm, now stood around my head in crazy tufts, rough and tangled and knotted between patches of bare scalp where it had fallen or been pulled out.
I was more terrifying than any witch.
I raised a hand, a claw, on which the veins stood out like strands of blue cord on a field of red-blotched white, and I touched my face. Then I started to laugh, loudly, madly. I laughed and laughed at the ironies of life. I had thought that my life was over because Uncle Theo wanted me to marry a rich baron! Oh, that was delicious! And how angry I had been, how enraged, when I had looked at myself in the mirror on the night of my wedding ball, because I was too beautiful! Oh, it was funny! Madly, wickedly, wonderfully funny!
"Oh, Josiah, look, look at what you have created!" I shrieked. I waved my stick-like arms at him. "A witch! A real black sea-witch, Josiah!" I saw him pale and step away from me, and I persisted in my madness. I dropped my voice to a gravelly whisper. "I have new powers now, Josiah." I rolled my eyes. "Powers to heal and powers to curse. And I curse you, Josiah Fowler! I curse you, I curse you, I curse you!"
I scrambled after him, howling like a fiend, and he scuttled out the door. I lay back on the berth and laughed. He was really frightened of me, the fool! Oh, why hadn't I thought of it before? Sailors are superstitious, and even captains are not immune. I had put the fear of demons into him. I laughed again, and the sound that came to my ears was wild and lonely. Lonely. I turned over and wept deeply, from the soul, as I had never wept before.
Fowler's visits were less frequent after that. As we neared Jamaica he spent more time supervising the feeding and exercising of the slaves so they would present a fine appearance as they stepped off the boat and fetch a high price. He took to sleeping in his own cabin, for which I was thankful. Although he still used me to satisfy his uncontrollable cravings, he eyed me warily now, half believing that I had turned into a witch. I mumbled to myself in French a lot because he hated it. It was worth a cuff or a blow to see him go red with anger and then white with fear.
"Stop that damned jargon, do you hear?" he would shout. "Or by God—"
"Ah, que vous êtes l' animal le plus gros et despicablede tout le monde," I would croon. I had a weapon now, and I did not hesitate to use it. I discovered that incantations in Latin, muttered low while gazing at him out of the corner of my eye, were even more effective. I racked my brain for snatches of schoolgirl Latin and drove him to distraction, even when he was on top of me, with amo, amas, amat and veni, vidi, vici.
I knew that my danger was becoming more acute as we neared the end of our journey. I did not think for a moment that he would let me live to see civilization so that I could expose his brutality to the world. And his sailors, who had a stake in this voyage, too, would certainly stand behind him.
One day I taunted him too gleefully, and I was surprised and appalled when he hauled me to my feet and began pulling me towards the passage, saying, "I'm going to throw you to the real sharks today. You're gonna scream like you ain't never screamed before."
I unleashed the full range of my curses at him, but he dragged me along, unheeding, unafraid. Down the narrow corridor amidships, up the gangway to the deck. Into the sunlight. I gasped and covered my eyes with my hands, stumbling blindly in the glare. I had lived like a mole for—I had no idea how many days. The air felt warmer, warmer than it had been on that wintry day when they had taken Garth away and given me Josiah Fowler in his place.
The Captain gave me a shove and I fell heavily on my knees. "All hands, all hands," he shouted.
I heard murmurs of surprise and wonder, and the clatter of footfalls on the boards. The sails billowed and rustled above me: I could hear them bellying noisily as they caught the wind and lost it and caught it again, ballooning and deflating. I rubbed my eyes and looked around me. A forest of legs and feet, some shod, some not. Some hairy, some smooth. Breeches, most in rags. Heavy belts and open shirts revealing grimy manly chests, some mus
cular, some scrawny. And faces, filled with curiosity and dismay and fear. The crew had gathered.
"Mrs. McClelland." Murmurs of wonder and amazement. "Mrs. McClelland has been ill, gentlemen." A few chuckles. He couldn't pull the wool over their eyes as easily as that. "Ill, I said. She can't remember she's a woman, isn't that strange? I think she needs a reminder from some of you fellows. A gentle reminder." Genuine laughter now. They could see how gently I had been treated.
They shuffled their feet, shifting their weight from one leg to the other in nervous schoolboy fashion. They had caught the lust from him now. They had the scent of woman in their nostrils, white flesh as opposed to the black flesh they had been grabbing in the hold.
"You see this coin, mates?" I looked up and caught the glint of gold in the Captain's hand. One of my gold louis. "This coin goes to the first man who has the goodness and pity in him to cure this lady of her sad affliction."
They were frozen for a moment as the bribe sank in. They circled me slowly like a pack of hungry wolves. Their eyes were bright and cold. I knew what held them back: they thought I was a witch and they were afraid. Nonetheless, I was amazed that the twin bribes of gold and a woman failed to move them.
"Are ye frightened of a damned whore?" the Captain bellowed angrily. "By God, you cowards! A coin to each man who cures the lady, then!"
I went down under them like a lame caribou falling to the wolf pack that has been stalking her for days. Hands ripped away every shred of my dress and grabbed eagerly at my flesh and my hair and my face. They wanted their reward badly enough now.
I must have started to bleed almost immediately. Soon they fell back, muttering. Then the real pains began. From the silent depths of my agony I brought forth a spine-curdling, tortured scream. My body writhed and twisted from this new pain, and my tormentors looked down on me as I jerked and gasped. Then a broadsword cut into my loins and slashed me again and again. I shouted and screeched my pain for all of them to hear.
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