Connie, her eyes filled with terror, puts her hands together and says, "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He leadeth me—"
The Captain releases her neck and backhands her to the deck of the Stage. He looks about for his next victim. It turns out he doesn't have to choose.
"W-will you send me home if I tell you?" comes a quavering voice from on his right.
Oh, Elspeth, no!
A smile comes over the Captain's face and he turns to her. "Of course, my dear, I will send you home if you tell me. On my word of honor."
Elspeth's eyes are wild as she holds her supplicating hands up to the Captain. Then she blurts it out.
"Jacky's the one you want! Right there!" she cries, pointing her finger at me. "She's the leader! She's the one who's been a pirate and everything! She put everyone up to this. Oh, I can't stand it here! Take her, take all of them! Just let me go! You'll let me go now, won't you? Now that I've told you? You will, won't you? Oh, you promised you would, you—"
"Take her up on deck!" roars Blodgett, and he ain't talking about Elspeth. He charges back up the hatchway as Chubbuck and Dunphy each grab one of my arms and I am dragged out the gate. I manage one look back at Elspeth's face. She looks at the retreating Captain and then at me.
"I'm sorry, Jacky, I'm sorry. But I just can't be here any longer, I just can't...," she blubbers, and then I'm up the stairs and on the top deck, blinking against the light.
The Captain stands by the mast and I am shoved in front of him. "That Dobbs fellow said you was a troublemaker and I guess he was right. Take off your dress!" he bellows in my face. I try to keep my legs from shaking as I reach back and unfasten the button at the back of my neck. The Captain turns from me and ... Good Lord, he's taken the Cat-of-nine-tails from its hook on the mast!
I stand there trembling for real now and staring only at the Cat. Could it be that I am to be flogged?
"Take off the dress. I won't tell you again," he says through clenched teeth.
Despairing, I reach up with my right hand and slip my left sleeve over my shoulder and then with my left hand I slip off the right sleeve and my dress falls off me to the deck. I step out of it.
"Tie her to the mast. Face-first," says the Captain, matter-of-factly now.
Chubbuck barks out two names, and two brutes take me to the mast and roughly shove me up against it. One holds me to it, while the other ties a rope to my right wrist and loops it around the mast and then ties my other wrist. I am left hugging the mast tightly, so tightly that I won't slip down when my legs fail to hold me up.
It's really going to happen, oh, Lord help me...
"Get the rest of them up here. I want them to see this. And watch them! I want no one jumping over the side!"
The girls are brought up on deck, and they stand there, tremulously waiting.
"Now you listen to me, all of you! I ain't gonna stand for any more of your horseshit, you hear me? Do you?" snarls the Captain, waving the Cat at them, its nine blood-crusted strands of knotted rope snaking and twining about under their noses. "Well, you'd better listen to me, 'cause this is what you're gonna get if you don't!"
I hear him come up next to me. He wraps his fingers around a big shank of my hair and snaps back my head to make me look at the foul thing in his hand. Then he puts the Cat back on its hook. Maybe he was just bluffing, maybe ... oh, please...
"I'm not going to scar you, girl, you're worth too much for that," he says in a low growl, "but I promise you this: You will never, ever, forget this day." With that, he lets go of my hair and grabs my undershirt at the nape of my neck in both his hands and rips it down the back to my waist, then pulls the ragged remnants down over my shoulders.
He steps back, picks up the Cat again, and in a moment I hear it hissing through the air on its way to my nak*d back.
Chapter 25
The hunger strike is over and we are back down in the belly of the Bloodhound.
After the Captain had finished whipping me and my bonds were cut from my wrists and I had collapsed barely conscious to the deck, it was Sylvie and Annie and Dolley, I think, who picked me up and carried me down the stairs of the hatchway. I was handed up to my kip on the Balcony, my chest heaving with great, wracking sobs. The pain, good Lord, the awful, searing pain...
I had sense enough to realize that the Captain had followed us into the Hold and stood regarding his cargo. Most were grouped about me, but not all—a trembling Elspeth stood to the side and looked at the Captain expectantly, her eyes blinking rapidly in hope. A hope that I, even in my confusion and misery, knew to be a vain one.
"Captain ... please ... you said ... oh, send me home, please," she bleated. She wrung her hands and looked at him with imploring eyes. "I told you what you wanted to know, now—"
"Oh, I will send you home, girl, oh yes, I will be true to my word. But it will be to your new home in North Africa that I will send you," said Captain Blodgett. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of blue ribbon. He threw it at Elspeth's feet and she looked at it in confusion. "However, I will give you this. That is for your hair. And for your information. Good day to you, good day to you all. I trust you will be much better behaved in the future."
With that, he turned and went back up the ladder and out the hatch.
Elspeth looks after him, unbelieving, then she looks around at the girls standing about and feels their accusing eyes fixed on hers, and then she falls to her knees next to the cheap piece of ribbon and cries out her despair in a long, wordless wail of utter hopelessness. Before the hatch above is closed and locked, a jar is thrown down. It hits, bounces, and then rolls about on the deck and comes to rest at Rose's feet. She bends and picks it up.
"What is this, then?" she asks, opening the lid and sniffing at it.
I gulp and swallow and force myself to stop crying. "It—it is salve ... for my back," I manage to wheeze out. Rose looks at my back and then swallows and has to look away. Then she straightens up and comes to me to apply the medicine.
"No ... wait...," I say. My chest is still heaving, but I try to calm down, and when I get settled a bit, I say, "Bring her here ... bring her to me," and I'm looking down the rows of girls straight into the tormented eyes of Elspeth Goodwin.
"No, no," she says, desperately looking about like a hunted animal, cornered and without hope. "No, please, I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."
"Sorry ain't gonna do it, you snivelin' toad," says Clarissa, lunging toward her. Elspeth shrinks back, but Clarissa's hand lashes out and backhands her hard across the face. Elspeth cries out and buries her face in her hands, but she can't hide there, for Clarissa grabs a fistful of the girl's hair and drags her roughly forward, then forces her to kneel before me.
"Please don't hurt me! Please! Please! Don't hurt meeeeeee...," Elspeth keens, tears streaming out of her eyes, her face turned upward, her features distorted into a crazed mask of pain and shame. Sadly, I remember just how merry and bright those features once were.
"Give me your hand, Elspeth," I say, and reach my left hand out toward her. I wince a bit at having to move. She looks at my hand, uncomprehending. "Give me your hand," I say again. "I will not hurt you."
She shakily puts out her hand, as if presenting it to a coiled snake, fully expecting to be struck. I take her hand in mine.
"I forgive you, Elspeth, I do," I say. The girl whimpers and hangs her head. "I forgive you because you have grown up in a world where all was goodness and sweetness and light and you had no understanding of the vileness and evilness that exists in the world. You were not ready for it when it came at you so hard, and so it is not your fault. I forgive you."
She whimpers and clasps my hand.
"Now, Elspeth, you may put the salve on my back"
Rose hands her the jar. She nods and takes it and dips into it and gets some on her fingers and looks down at my back. "It's horrible ... so horrible." She shudders. "Everything is just so ... horrible I can't stand it!"
"Yes, you can. Now just do it."
She sniffles and nods and reaches out and starts putting the salve on the welts on my shoulders. I stiffen and cry out at the touch ... It burns, oh sweet Jesus, it burns ... and she jerks back.
"No, no, it's ... all right. Just do it," I say and grit my teeth and steel myself for the ordeal. The Captain was true to his word—he did not scar me. He made sure that none of the Cat's claw marks overlapped any of the others. His first stroke took me high on the shoulders, and while I did gasp in shock, I did not cry out. His second was lower and I groaned and writhed in agony, but it was his third, the one that caught me around the waist when the Cat's tails snaked around and stung my belly, that's when I lost all control and shrieked out my anguish and pain. The other strokes I don't remember too well. I know I begged for mercy and got none. I know my legs went out on the fourth and I thereafter hung limp, held up only by the ropes around my wrists. I think there were six lashes in all, but I don't know. I was beyond knowing anything by then.
Now I'm lying down here in the gloom, with the weeping and choking Elspeth rubbing the salve over the rows of red and swollen welts on my back with all the girls looking on. Eventually, she gets it covered with the greasy medicine, and it does feel better, and I am able to sink down and rest my face on the backs of my hands and reflect on things.
The first thought that rages through my mind is I will see thee in Hell for what you did to me, Captain Blodgett, you may count on that! Secondly, I realize the good that has come of this: All of the girls now see exactly what treachery will bring them—a tiny bit of blue ribbon and an ocean of shame.
The strike is broken, but we will not be. I lift my head and speak.
"I, Jacky Faber, swear on my very life that I will never betray you, my sisters, and I will bend every fiber of my being to gaining our release from this prison, even if I myself do not live to see it." I look to Clarissa.
She looks back at me and says, "I, Clarissa Worthington Howe, do swear on my very life that I will not betray you, my sisters, and I will bend every fiber of my being to gaining our release from this hellhole, even if I do not live to see it."
Dolley steps up and takes my hand in hers. "I, Dorothy Frazier, do so swear on my life that I will never betray you, my sisters, in any way and will strive with every fiber of my being to gain our freedom from this hell, even if I do not live to see it."
Then Beatrice Cooper and Hermione Applegate, and then Annie Byrnes and Sylvie Rossio, and then girl after girl till all have made their testament. Lissette stumbles on the English but gets the sense of it right, and then plainspoken Rose Crawford says, "So say you all, and so says I." The last was Martha Hawthorne who simply said, "Martha Livingston Hawthorne, the daughter of patriots and on their names, so sworn."
When all are done and Elspeth still stands sobbing by my side, Clarissa stoops to the deck and snatches the scrap of blue ribbon. She comes up next to Elspeth and again grabs a fistful of her hair and forces her to her knees. Elspeth looks up at her, her eyes wild with fear and despair. "She may have forgiven you, Elspiss, but I have not," hisses Clarissa into her ear. "You shall wear this mark of shame until the day you die, and I hope that day is soon!" With that, she wraps the ribbon around the clump of hair she holds and ties it tight, cruelly tight. Then she shoves Elspeth back into the shadows, where the whimpering girl goes down, curls into a ball of misery, and says nothing. And she will say nothing for days and days and days.