Chard sat up and blinkered his eyes from the sun. “Envy does not become you, Robert.” A weary resignation colored his words and gestures. “Unfurl your sails, brother, for I seen your mainmast is a-ready risen. What’s mine is yours. Heave to.”
It happened so quickly that she had only time to cry one No, and Waters was upon her. Lying beneath the ramming man, she turned her face to Mr. Chard to plead her cause and was horrified to see his intense stare and pleasure at studying the spectacle unfolding within arm’s reach. After Waters had finished, he rolled off her and kicked the trousers from his ankles. The three stretched out under the summer sky like sails set out to dry, thoughtful of the strange fate that had brought them thus together. The men did not notice that Jane was in tears, and Waters only said, “We must never tell Mr. Carter,” whereon he and Chard laughed like schoolboys ripe with mischief.
And so they continued that June to make three out of two. At times, it would be as it once was, she and Chard together, and at other times, Mr. Waters would visit to take his pleasure, and still other times, they would all three go off together in ways she could not fathom until the men explained their intricate plans. More shocking still, the acts encouraged Chard and Waters to visit each other without her present, as she had heard men long at sea were said to do, tho she could not bear their seeming preference, for Jane found herself loving one and then the other, wishing one away, longing for the other’s return. In her feelings, they were two halves of one man. Whereas Mr. Chard was still gentle in private and coarse in public, Mr. Waters was most kind in public but like a wild man when they made the beast with two backs in private stolen hours. Waters’s passion excited her, and she recollected his promise when in the cave, and Chard, tho oft cruel, had the advantage of being first, and thus, in some way she could not reconcile even unto herself, best.
In those rare moments when neither man bothered her, she wished for some way to make one man out of two and sometimes no man at all, for tho she knew not any before leaving England, Jane felt certain that moral law concluded sharing her bed was wrong, and moreso, she found herself preferring the other when one was upon her, missing the absent man, and thinking him the better of the two. She feared as well the ire of God for her fornication, and more than once resolved to confess her sins and rid herself of the men. She sought out Mr. Carter and found him alone on the beach, Bible in hand, and the other two men gone, off tupping one another, she supposed. In a casual manner, she approached and begged him to walk with her upon the strand so that they might talk, for some heavy thing rested in the heart. The mastiff Crab gamboled in the surf ahead of them, barking at the crashing waves, and fetching a stick thrown on the waters. Carter clutched the book in his crossed hands behind his back and walked like a great heron, long-stalked, his gaze fixed upon the ground, as gentle as a vicar gone a-courting, and Jane struggled to keep pace, her thoughts awhirl in her head, her eyes darting to the man’s inscrutable face, to the dog playing in the sea, to the strange visions present in memory of her two seducers. Where to begin my prologue, she thought, how best to tell the tale? Thanking Carter for his confidence, she leapt ahead, rehearsing the dark secret, wondering how he might react to her unsexing; would he understand and treat her as Ravens had, or would he, too, fall upon her like a savage?
As she parted her lips to speak, Jane heard the dog bark instead and then come bounding from the sea, wagging its stumpy tail in circles as if to tell them something as dogs are wont to do by primitive means. Crab raced back to the object of its consternation, speaking loudly and with great excitement, and there, wedged within a trio of large stones, what appeared to be a dead man, tho they could not see to tell at first. As Carter and Jane made their way, wild surmises flitted across her senses: perhaps one of them, fallen from a boat or wandering on some hilltop and tumbling down, had drown’d in the ocean, and she feared it might be Waters, hoped it would be Chard, but just as she speculated, both men appeared from the opposite direction, running on the same shore, alerted by the dog’s alarums, so that all four arrived at the same spot more or less at the same time, and of the four, Chard seemed to know at once what had stopped in the crevasse. He hallooed them all and danced a jig upon the sand. “Rich, rich, I’m rich. It is the amber grease spat up from a whale.”
Big as a man and heavy, too, the white-gray lump of ambergris loosed itself with much effort from the mariners who dragged it from the water. Weighing about thirteen stone, the chunk looked like the torso of a giant, sans head or limbs, and caught as well among the rocks were several smaller pieces. Laughing and shouting the while, the men danced with one another, and Jane could not resist the temptation to taste a small pebble of the stuff, but it were most foul, and she spat out the speck in her hands.