‘If you’ll pray for mine,’ he said, ‘perhaps you will find more favour with God than I.’ And he quoted a favourite quotation of my father’s and therefore of my own, from the sad dispossessed queen of King Henry VIII of England. ‘I think the prayers of a friend be most acceptable unto God; and therefore I pray you to remember me in yours.’
‘You are my husband,’ I said. ‘I don’t call you my friend.’
‘Then I have no friend in the world,’ he said; and got up and stumbled over to the bed and there threw himself down and for a long time lay staring up at the low ceiling of the cabin; and slept at last. He had had little rest the night before and I think was as exhausted as I, by the events of the morning. I sat upright in one of those two wretched swinging chairs, but when I saw that he slept, I crept down to the floor and there curled for support against the carved rosewood spindle legs of the melodeon and also fell into a doze.
Was it while I played him his hymn tunes, stumbling through with those long, fine, curiously in-adept fingers of mine—that they crept down into the saloon and released her? Or were we too much preoccupied in that conversation which in fact was the last—as such—that we were ever to have together? We were awakened at any rate by the sound of feet pounding down the companion steps and through the saloon; our door was flung unceremoniously open. The chief mate, Richardson, stood there. He cried: ‘For God’s sake come, sir! They’ve got at the alcohol.’
My husband was up and off the bed, had caught up his peaked cap and was running through the saloon and up the companion steps before I had stumbled to my feet. I heard now a strange thudding above my head which I came to recognise as the sound of bare feet stamping along the decks, men’s voices shouting and laughing. I rushed after the two men and halfway up the companion-way.
Not a breath of wind. As far as the eye could see, only the limitless sea with its faint, undulating swell of unbroken heavy green glass; no motion in sail or spar or rope or in the utter stillness of the ship. Only…
Only six of the men—but for himself and Richardson, the whole of his crew—standing, reeling, rolling in a helplessness of drunken laughter, facing my husband across the width of the ship as he stood with the first mate at his side; and on the poop deck above them, Honey Mary, with her amber eyes aglow, crying out in triumph: ‘So, my fine Captain—see which of your crew will obey you now! See which of your crew will keep me caged up like a beast!’ A beast of the forest, I thought, hidden at the top of the companion-way, watching it all with terror in my soul. A beast of the forest: tiger, tiger, burning bright… A golden tigress, fearless, untameable…
I could never have believed that such a change could come over a man. He seemed to grow in stature almost to a giant; the blaze that came so often to his eyes was a blaze now of black fury, his whole face seemed to grow dark with a passion of rage. In three strides he was up the steps and half across the poop deck and had caught her by the arm, twisted it behind her and threw her violently from him to fall in a shuddering heap to the ground. ‘You foul thing of evil!’ he yelled out at her, ‘You’ve destroyed us all!’ and he left her there and flung himself down again to the main deck. A man started forward, stumbling, with raised fist; in one movement my husband had torn a belaying pin from its hold in the deck rail and thrown it with all his force. It caught the man on the head and he fell like an animal pole-axed, to the deck. Richardson said: ‘My God, sir—they’ll be dangerous now!’
As I cowered in the entrance to the companion-way, the men were to my left, bunched against the rail, my husband and the chief mate to my right and across from me Mary, huddled in her dress of scarlet, raised up three or four feet on the poop deck. She had hauled herself painfully up, clutching first at one of the oaken buckets which stood there and now toppled over spilling water all about the deck, and then to the rail. I could see how her face lit up with a new light, how her eyes took on a new gleam as she saw the wooden bolt flung and the man fall.
The man was Gilling, the second mate. Richardson ran forward, caught him by the arm, hauled him out of the way of the trampling feet; cried out, ‘Enough, sir, they’re cowed now, you have them beaten!’ ‘Beaten!’ he shouted, ‘I’ll have them beaten and at the rope’s end, but I’ll beat them first with my own two hands, and show them who’s master here!’ and fending off two with his left arm, laid about a third with the wooden club. From my hiding place half way down the companion-way, I saw Mary raise her bright head and stand there, staring. His cap had fallen off, his dark hair, loosened, tossed about his face which now seemed alive with a sort of gratified savagery, horrible to see. Richardson, fending off the attacks of the men with his bare hands, cried out again, ‘Sir, leave it! They’ve had enough!’ Not she! The struggle was now all at the port side of the deck, around the steps that led up to the poop. She darted down the further side, came to the companion, pushed me out of her way. ‘His pistol! Where does he keep his pistol?’ she cried.
‘His pistol?’ I said stupidly. ‘He has no need—’
‘Oh, get aside, you fool!’ she said and thrust herself past me and into our cabin; came back with the pistol in her hand—it had not been hard to find. I stood now in the saloon, weeping in terror. ‘Come on, come up, you thing of whey!’ she cried to me, catching me by the hand, trying to drag me with her back up to the deck. ‘Come up and show yourself, stand up and be proud—be proud of such a man!’
I struggled in her grasp. ‘Take your hands off me!’
She dropped them at once. She said on a new note, a note I had never heard in her voice before: ‘Ay, so I will. So I will, my honey!—and get them on him, one day. And never let him go.’
I sat down on the bench at the table where we ate our meals, lay across the table with my head on my arm. For now I knew. Stupid, dull, vague, timid—very well; but I had always been aware of things that others didn’t come to understand for a long time, or never understood at all. And now I knew. A coward she had always called him and affected to despise him for that reason; but I recalled how she had told me of her father, so handsome and so desirable, had made little secret to herself or to me that even as an adolescent child, she had—desired him: of the taunting, teasing mother who would give herself to any man but him—denying him what the daughter would have given him, horrible though the thought might be to me; ‘so fierce and strong, laying about him with his great mermaid stick!’ The stick that he had brought home from some foreign travels, very heavy, with its carved body of a mermaiden and its tail, sharp divided, ‘and a vicious bitch she was and with a taste for blood!’ Many a scalp the child had seen split and bleeding in defence of her mother’s virtue, by the sharp, cutting tail of the mermaid, or her blunted head. And his wife also, to enforce his demands on her. ‘It amazed me that she could refuse him. If I hadn’t been his daughter… But I could only look on, filled with a guilty longing to be in her place, beaten into subjection. Because, after all, I was his daughter.’
But she was not the daughter of Captain Benjamin Briggs.
Up on deck, there was quiet at last. He came down the companion-way, dragging her by the wrist, and thrust her to sit down at the table across from me. I saw that the pistol hung heavy, weighing down the pocket of his serge jacket, but he had forgotten it. He said: ‘Do you know what you’ve done?’
‘I have found you,’ she said. He ignored her. She caught at his sleeve. ‘Didn’t I stand beside you, didn’t I fend them off, didn’t they run howling when you and I faced them together each with a great stick in our hand? I thought you were a coward, a poor thing; but now I know—’
He cut her off: I wondered that he had heard her so far but he also seemed strange, changed; it seemed to me that subtly, they had become one—those two. He said, however, heavily: ‘You don’t know what you’ve done—’
‘I wanted to tease you. You told them to cage me up. When they’re sober again—’
‘They won’t be sober again,’ he said. ‘What you’ve given them is crude alcohol. Men go blind,
go deaf, they die. None will ever be sober again.’
‘They drank—’ She broke off. ‘They wouldn’t drink at first. I told them it was a special barrel I’d got smuggled aboard. There was an odd number of barrels—?’
‘Seventeen hundred and one,’ he said. I knew that somewhere in his dark heart he was thinking how clever she had been to light upon a detail like that…
‘I said that the extra barrel was mine. I said it was rum.’ She looked up hopefully. ‘They drank not very much; they soon knew it wasn’t rum.’
‘It would seem to have been enough,’ he said. ‘And perhaps you’ll explain, who have been so clever about it all—how I’m to sail my ship eight hundred miles more across the Atlantic, myself and my chief mate, and the rest useless.’
She clung to his arm. ‘I’ll work for you. I’ll work for you like any man, I know all about ships. Sarah will see to the woman’s work.’
What had come to him that he only said, not moving himself away from her: ‘And you’ll go up in the rigging when the storms blow?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘If you send me there.’ She was like a sick woman, sick with her passion, leaning back away from him to look up into his face. ‘Will you drive me up there with a belaying pin in your hand?’
Now he did shake off the clutching hands. ‘I’d drive you to hell,’ he said, ‘if I could.’
‘I’ll go there willingly,’ she said, ‘if you’ll come with me.’
‘Having dragged me down so far,’ he said, answering her, look for look, ‘I might well go with you the rest of the way.’
I staggered up to my feet, clutching at the table, my fingers in the slits where the fiddles would be inserted when the weather was rough and the crockery slid about the table. ‘Captain Briggs,’ I said, ‘have you lost your mind?’
‘He has lost his soul,’ she said, brilliant with triumph, ‘and into my keeping.’
I made to push past him; ‘I’ll leave you then to your pit of hell,’ I said. But feet came running again, and the chief mate appeared for a second time, and now he dragged Gilling, the second mate, with him by the arm, and shoved him to stand before my husband. ‘Tell the Master,’ he said. ‘Tell the Master what you’ve told me!’
Gilling reeled a little where he stood but he had evidently taken less to drink than the rest. He said sullenly: ‘A fuse, sir. Among the kegs of alcohol.’
‘A fuse?’ my husband repeated: confounded.
‘In among the barrels. I didn’t know what I was doing. You think I’m drunk,’ said Gilling, belligerently, ‘but it was the battering you gave me. I got away out of it all and—well, I was mad, sir. I had a bit of drink, yes, true, but not all that much. And you hit me down to the ground
My husband was up and had thrust Mary ahead of him so as to get out from the table, catching hold of the man by the throat of his jersey, shaking him like a rat. ‘But—a fuse? What do you mean?’ It seemed as though the horror of it confounded his senses. ‘A fuse among the cargo—?’
‘She’ll go up like a rocket,’ the man said, ‘when the alcohol ignites.’
‘You’ve lit a—? Among the kegs in the hold?’ He grasped Gilling by the arm now, began to haul him towards the companion-way. ‘Show me where!’
‘You’ll never see it, sir. I’ve thrown it deep in.’
He left the man, tore away up the companion, Richardson at his heels. Mary grasped at Gilling’s arm. ‘What is it, what have you done?’
‘Lit a fuse. Thrown it in among the barrels. If the spirit catches, she’ll go up like a torch.’
‘The ship—?’
‘It’s a slow fuse. But it’s burning. Deep in among the barrels. When the alcohol ignites…’ He began to look about him, as though coming more to his senses. ‘We shall burn to death,’ he said.
She caught at my hand and together we ran up to the deck, he staggering after us. The men were there, lurching about, retching, vomiting, cursing in a volley of filthy oaths. It seemed a long time before Richardson came to us, climbing up from the hold, by the companion ladder that led down below decks. He said: ‘We can’t find it. We can see nothing, it’s like pitch down there. The Captain’s orders—’ He broke off as my husband came up after him. ‘The women must leave the ship. Lower away the yawl! You two girls—go down into her and stand off until I give you a signal, if the ship burns, you must just let the boat drift, in time you’ll be picked up, we’re in the trade routes now. Go down and get your shawls, snatch up anything warm. Be quick, there’s not a moment to lose!’ He waited for no answer, shouted to Richardson to help him, began knocking away the chocks that held the little boat, propped there towards the stern of the ship. Mary made no move; but I went down to the cabins as he had told me to, and snatched up her shawl and mine. When I came back she was still standing where I had left her, he and Richardson working at the fastenings, all the time roaring to the men to pull themselves together and come to their assistance. The yawl swung and tilted, he clung for dear life to the ropes that lowered her; she ran to his side and lent her strength to his; the boat landed with a splash on the gently heaving waters, just to one side astern of the vessel. Richardson was tying a long rope to the rail of the deck, securing it doubly to some stanchion or bollard, I don’t know the names of these things. He said: ‘We’d better send the worst of the men with them.’
‘Send two women out alone in the boat with such creatures?’ said my husband. ‘They’d not be safe a moment. Let them perish with us. It’s their work, after all.’
‘Only Gilling’s.’
‘They’re drunk, they’re out of their senses, they’d have the yawl tipped over and the whole lot drowned. The women go. Nobody else.’ He got hold of me by the arm. ‘Come, Sarah, down the rope! There’s no time, we must get back to the hold.’
Down the rope! It dangled like a dead snake, above the frail cockle shell hardly discernible, fifteen feet or more below us, in the fading of the evening light. I cried: ‘I couldn’t! I couldn’t!’
‘Get down, you fool!’ he cried. ‘While you waste time here, any moment the ship may go up. We should be searching now. Richardson—?’
Richardson left us, caught up a lantern, and ran back to the companion ladder down to the hold. All about the decks, the men reeled about, or sat hunched, sick, listless, witless, useless. He said to Mary: ‘Go first. She’ll follow you.’
She stood perfectly still, looking back into his eyes. ‘I’ll go when you go,’ she said.
‘I go! I can’t leave my ship!’
‘Then I’ll stay here with you,’ she said.
He pushed his way past her, caught at my arm, yanked me to the rail. ‘Come—no more of this! Down with you!’
But she pushed her way between us and the rail. ‘You won’t leave her. And she shan’t go till I go too. And I shan’t go till you go ahead of me!’
He would have knocked her aside, I think, with as little compunction as he’d used with the men but he needed her unharmed and active, he knew that I could never make that effort alone. He said: ‘I leave her to you. If you don’t go and take her with you, I hold you responsible for her death. I must get back to the hold. I leave you in my place.’ He turned and disappeared again below decks.
She ran from one man to another. ‘Go down and help search! Come with me and help look for the fuse! If it’s not found, you’ll all perish: all be blown sky high and come down in a hundred pieces, legs and arms and heads and bodies, strewn about the water!—can’t you understand me, don’t you know what’s happening, come down and help in the search!’ But they were hopeless, leaden-eyed, leaden of limb, or idiotically grimacing and laughing. ‘It’s no use,’ she said to me. ‘We shall have to leave them and just go ourselves.’
‘I can’t go, I can’t; I can’t bear heights, and to slither down that rope into the darkness—’
‘You don’t think I mean to the boat?’ she said. ‘I mean, go to help him.’
‘Down into the hold. You can’t—’
‘Where he goes, so will I,’ she said.
I knew nothing of fuses, of the inflammability of spirit; only that at any moment, as she had said to the men, the ship might be rocketed into the air with a mighty explosion. ‘There are hundreds of barrels, seventeen hundred barrels, Mary, stacked high to the cover of the hold. If the thing has been thrown in amongst them, even if he finds it, he may not reach it. And Richardson’s with him there. He’s told us to go down to the boat. For God’s sake, come!’
She looked at me without scorn, perhaps with pity. ‘You go, my honey,’ she said. ‘But where he is, I must stay.’
Even in the midst of my misery and terror I cried out to her: ‘What’s happened to you? You hated him. What’s happened to you—both?’
‘We’ve recognised like for like,’ she said. ‘The tigress has found her mate.’
I went to the deck rail and looked down. The yawl was hardly more than a rowing boat—was, in fact a rowing boat, but with a small sail aboard: no more than fourteen or fifteen feet long. Now the calm was ending, with the coming of evening a little breeze had blown up, the brig began to rock gently, the boat bobbed and jerked at her tether, I felt that even if I somehow forced myself to slither down the rope, I might fall between the ship’s hull and the edge of the boat; nor could I manage such a craft on my own, had no strength to row, no knowledge of sail, couldn’t even swim. Besides… To go off alone, escape alone from danger leaving all these others behind—leaving another woman behind… I stood looking out across the dark waters where now the swell began to break with the familiar little streaks of white foam as the waves fell back upon themselves. I prayed: ‘Into Thy hands, oh Lord, I commend my spirit!’ And I prayed that he, my husband, might not go from the jaws of hell that now closed about him, into a hell of all eternity; that the great God who had implanted within him passions beyond his control, would be merciful at the last. And I prayed for her too: ‘Father forgive them, for they know not what they do…’
I stood a long time at the rail. I knew now that I must die; that surely we all must die. But death would be swift and merciful and I asked myself—poor little girl of eighteen years old—what I had to live for. What happiness had I to lose? All my life until now, I had been hectored and bullied for my stupidity, had lived in insecurity and fear; within the last days, I had found a new strength, a new recognition of what I might be that made up for other qualities I lacked—and in the past few hours had lost it all again: was reduced to a useless, unwanted thing that might come—but I thought would not be permitted to come—between those two. I said to God in my heart: ‘I have nothing to lose, nothing to regret. It’s only that I’m afraid.’ A little breeze blew against my face, blew aside the pale hair long ago torn from its decorous bands. It was as though God had put out His hand to me and softly caressed my cheek. I lifted up my head and said again the only prayer I prayed that night for myself: ‘Into Thy hands, oh Lord…’
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