Free Honey Harlot by Christianna Brand

putting aside of my insecurities and stepping forward again with a new optimism into the path of life—knowing in my heart that it would turn like the way of Hans Andersen’s mermaid to knives beneath my tender feet. My husband was dressed and gone—for once without awakening me; and I rose and washed and dressed, all the time thinking what I had best do next. I had had made, especially for shipboard, a dress of a deep blue cloth, not navy, but a sort of deep moonlight blue, with a white frill at the neck and two bands of white braid running across the bosom and over the tops of the sleeves; the sleeves full, caught into narrow wrist-bands, the waist small and belted, the skirt very full. I had fitted myself with soft deck shoes and my mother’s wedding gift had been a great shawl of softly woven wool, not brilliantly coloured as Mary’s was, but with a sort of warm all-over sheen of silvery grey. I wrapped it now about me and went up on deck.
    Now we were three full days out and well into the ocean, and the ship had begun her habitual gentle roll in seas more heavily rolling than those we had so far known. I staggered a little, holding on to the rail of the steep steps up to the deck, lifting my skirts to step over the high sill, almost lurching into a run as I made for the deck rail. Living in the state of Massachusetts, I was not unfamiliar with the ocean, I had as a child found my sea legs and learned that the movement of a ship did not upset my stomach as it does with so many. If I now and again felt a little queasy, two or three deep breaths of the salty breeze restored me to normality. I remember that morning I wondered if the same would apply to Mary, whether all our troubles might not yet be saved by her being confined throughout a rough voyage to her bunk—some bunk, at any rate—with seasickness. I need not have troubled myself with hope: trust Mary to ride any storm as proudly as the ship itself, glorying in the lashing waves of high seas breaking over the decks, surging against the bare feet of the toiling men, crashing up against the sides of the deckhouse, soughing back again into the body of the ocean; rearing their white crests to dash themselves again against the vessel’s sides. I too loved a storm, there was something in it that thrilled me to the soul: but Mary—she was a storm in herself, a storm within a storm, she rode with it, gloried in it as she gloried in all that was dangerous and wild. There can never have been any creature, so utterly without fear. I would have liked to go up into the forepeak—the expressions come back to me as I think over the long-ago days, but I daresay I get most of them wrong—and stand in the very prow where the great bowsprit thrust its length ahead of the body of the ship, over the curl of the water as the clean edge of the bows cleft its way through. Had we carried a figurehead, she would have lain along just beneath the bowsprit, chin thrust forward to meet the spray of those curling waters, but we carried none: I was the only figurehead aboard that ship, with my heart of bleeding wood. But my husband had said that I should remain aft; only, to stay there was to be under the scrutiny all the time of whichever of the men was taking his trick at the wheel, that’s what they called it ‘taking their trick’—or ‘standing their trick’, I never got these terms right. It was Boz Lorenzen’s brother, Volkert, this morning—Volk, they called him. Another of ‘The Breughels’. He sketched me a vague salute and called, ‘Morning, Ma’am!’ I think that their original hostility had lain in their guilty knowledge that Honey Mary was aboard, that they had done me a wrong in bringing her there. Now that I knew the secret, they shrugged off the guilt, perhaps were even inclined to make up to me for it. At any rate, he touched the peak of his shabby black cap and called a greeting.
    I picked up my skirts and stepped up the little ladder to the poop deck and