Sacred Hunger (13 page)

“Pass him the bottle,” Billy said, in a tone of resignation. “Was that you snufflin” just now?”’

‘no, there’s another feller here alongside of me.”

As if this were a signal, the whimpering began again.

Deakin hesitated a moment, then reached out and touched the shoulder of the man lying near him pressed against the boat’s side. “Hold your noise,” he said.

“What’s your name?”’

“Dan’l Calley.” The voice came choked with mucus and tears. “I don’t want to stay here.”

‘Be jabers,” Sullivan said in a tone of affected surprise. “You up there!” he called out. “There’s a man here says he doesn’t want to stay. I think he should see the capting.”

A different voice answered this time, harsher, more violent than the first. “Damn you, stow your gab.

There’s no more rum. You get a bucket of bilge-water if you don’t keep quiet.”

Deakin kept his hand on the man’s shoulder a few moments longer. The choked voice had touched something in him. He had heard men cry for pain before; and he had stood at the guns, on decks strewn with bodies and running with blood, and wept with exhaustion; but he had never heard a grown man whimper with misery like this. Now, in his despair, it was as if he heard his own tears of the past, heard his own voice in the dark nights of long ago and found a comforter. “Keep your spirits up, Dan’l,” he said. “Be a man.

There’s nothing to do but wait for the morning.”

“Aye,” Billy said, “a man has to look on the bright side. I got a few drams an” a plate o’ meat pies before that screw took off wi’ my purse. I wish I could of fucked her an’ all,” he added wistfully.

‘allyou will lose more than that again,” Sullivan said. “Whativer they have give the landlord for us comes out of our wages, mebbe two guineas apiece.”

“God will find out that fat buggeranto of a landlord.

An” in case not I will find him out when I get back an’ I will slit him up the nose. Here, lads, let’s have the bottle back this end.”

‘Don’t you be mentioning God to me. I stopped believin” in him years ago, but now I am goin’ to give him up for good. He has shipped me on a slaver only for tryin’ to stand up for a shipmate.”

‘Aye, that’s right.” Gloom descended on Billy. “Took for the Africa trade,” he said bitterly. “An” looka that, there’s nowt left in the bottle. Them fellers down there have supped it all up.”

After a long silence, during which Billy thought Sullivan had fallen asleep, the mournful voice came out of the darkness. “I hope me fiddle is all right. If they have broke it, I will have the law of them, sure as me name’s Michael Sullivan.”

“Law of them, you daft bumbo? They have threw you down here, they are goin” to send you chasin’ quashees up an’ down all the pox-ridden rivers on the Guinea Coast, an’ you talk about gettin’ the law of them for the sake of your bleddy fiddle.”

‘I see well that you know nothin” at all about the law,” Sullivan said. ‘Me fiddle is property. It comes under a different headin”dis”

Sitting above in the ramshackle shelter they had built aft of the hatchway, with Cavana asleep beside him, Hughes heard the voices below and the silence that surrounded the voices and both sound and silence were of the same quality to him and had the same degree of meaning. The sky was clearing now, after the rain, and the wind was veering southwest and freshening comhe could hear the strengthening slap of the wash against the buoy to which the hulk was moored. While the wind stayed in that quarter they would not clear the river.

He sat hunched against the chill, his cloak over his shoulders. He did not like the proximity of Cavana, breathing heavily beside him. But there was no other shelter on the hulk. Human beings too close constricted him to the point of violence sometimes —on board ship he never slept below except in the worst of weathers. Neither did he like the job of guarding pressed men, it made for bad blood at sea, but he had been detailed for it and had no intention of getting a flogging for their sake, so he kept awake; men determined enough might start the hatch or the rotten planking of her sides, and try to swim for it.

He was impatient for the sea again. At forty-three, Hughes was a stranger on land.

Brief, violent debauches at her dirty edges was all in twenty-five years he had known of her.

When there was nothing left to spend there was no reason for being ashore. Penniless, lightheaded with drink and venery, Hughes signed for the first ship he could get, so long as she was an ocean-going vessel. That this one was a slaveship made little difference—he had been on slaveships before.

He looked towards her now, where she lay out in the road. He could make out her deck lamps, their lights softened and diffused by the vaporous air surrounding her; she was enveloped in the mist of her own breath. She was a new-built ship and her timbers were breathing—Hughes knew this well enough. New timber would always steam on a cool night. But there are different sorts of knowledge and he had no doubt either that the Liverpool Merchant was panting for the open sea.

Late on the following day the wind changed direction slightly, veering between west and south.

Thurso, checking stores with his gunner, a lanky man named Johnson, between decks in the after part of the ship, felt the change at once, in the way she settled between wind and tide. He felt it in the balance of his body, as one might feel a change in the rhythm of music, though nothing showed in his face or changed in his voice.

‘Wind coming round ahead of us, Capting,” the gunner ventured, and received the full glare of the small eyes.

“When I want your opinion of the weather, or anything else, I’ll ask for it.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

Later, in the forecastle, Johnson was to relate, with suitable embellishments, this brief exchange, laying the first strand in the tissue of gossip, bravado, calumny and indirect abuse which is spun hour by hour and breath by breath among the crew of a ship and is that ship’s unwritten journal, voluminous, untrustworthy, dissolving like a dream when the ship reaches port and the crew is disbanded. “Turned on me like a tiger, he did, only because I spoke first. I tell you, he is goin” to be a tartar, this one. It wasn’t just lettin’ me know who is skipper. He was savage like, as if he would have had me seized up straight away for a good dozen.”

Shortly after midnight they cast off from the Pier Head. Running under her topsails against the flood, obedient to the cables that towed her, the Liverpool Merchant headed slowly towards the estuary. On the ebb she moored at Black Rock and waited for a change in the wind in company with two small brigs and a Danish schooner bound for Dublin.

They were obliged to stay here for the two days following. The pilot-boat came in from Liverpool with supplies of powder and bread and two sides of beef. Simmonds saw to the hoisting in of these, with Thurso’s eye upon him; the ship was fully loaded now and there was need for care in the stowage if she was to handle properly in the seas she would meet.

There was work enough apart from this to keep the crew busy.

Barton, his ear always alert for the hoarse voice from the quarterdeck, saw to the rigging of the jib boom and had the sails fixed on the longboat. Men were set plaiting rope yarns for cordage and making deck swabs out of old rope. Calley could not master this so soon and had to begin with something simpler; as a first step towards the delights he had been promised he found himself, in company with a ragged, shivering runaway of fourteen named Charlie, untwisting old ropes to make oakum for caulking seams and stopping leaks.

Libby, the big, one-eyed Londoner, veteran of several slaving trips, was given a special task —one which he was well qualified for, having once been bosun’s mate on a seventy-four-gun frigate. He was set down on the main deck, in full view of all, to fashion a cat o” nine tails. This was a longstanding practice of Thurso’s, it being the captain’s fixed belief that it did the men good to see, as they went about their tasks, the plaiting of the stem, the drawing-out one by one of the nine logline branches of the whip, the ritual tying of the four knots in each. It convinced them from the start of the seriousness of his intentions.

Paris, pleased to find himself so far clear in mind and untroubled in stomach, passed the time in reading, writing the first pages of the journal he had resolved to keep and walking about on deck, where he was able to follow Libby’s progress with the fearsome whip more closely than he liked. He had discovered that the small, malodorous room below the water-line which had been allotted as sick bay was taken up with rope and tackle and spare sail-cloth. Twice he had attempted to speak to Thurso about this but the captain had bitten him off short. Nonetheless, he was determined to take the matter up again at the first favourable opportunity.

On the third day, at a few minutes after four o’clock in the morning, Simmonds, whose watch it was, felt the wind turn fair against his face. As instructed, he roused Thurso immediately. The captain waited for the top of the high water then gave orders to weigh anchor.

Paris woke to the wailing cries of Haines, the bosun. He dressed quickly and came up in the first light to a scene of uproar and apparent confusion, shouted orders he could not make out, bewildering movements about the deck. Thurso stood above, on the quarterdeck, the only motionless element in this violent pandemonium. Then Paris began to see the division of tasks among the crew as they worked to spread and loose the great square mainsails. He heard the strange, drawn-out lamentation of men heaving at the windlass and in a few minutes knew that the ship was under way, knew it from the noise of the water thrown from her bows, from the way she leaned over in the damp dawn breeze and rolled with the heavy ground swell.

And so, in the course of that morning, the Liverpool Merchant was turned loose into the Irish Sea. With her mainsails set and a fair wind from the south-east, released from tethering rope and umbilical cable, she was for the first time in her life unfettered, free— save for her own groaning tensions—between wind and current.

Erasmus Kemp stood by the lakeside. The scene he looked forward to and dreaded was almost upon him.

Recently, between his public and private performances as Ferdinand, a yawning gap had developed. He had his lines by heart and could recite them perfectly when alone; but once in her presence his tongue stumbled, his throat dried. It was not timidity; he was not by nature timid and would have welcomed the opportunity to speak his love in his own voice.

What disconcerted him so terribly was having to pretend, as the price of being with her, that both of them were other people.

Nevertheless, he went on trying. Practising before the mirror in his bedroom he had achieved fluid and graceful motions of the hands and body and even dazzled smiles as at blinding beauty; but when it came to the rehearsals he moved like an automaton about the shores of the lake. He nursed the hope comand into it went all the passionate tenacity of his nature— that by endurance the gap would be closed and the accomplishments of his solitude win the day.

Of this there was small sign as yet. Meanwhile, though he was too locked in his travail fully to notice it, he was having a subtly demoralizing effect on the others. Miranda’s performance had lost sparkle, partly through the infection of his awkwardness, partly out of awe at the intensity of his regard, and this central uneasiness between the lovers was exacerbating the strains and divisions already existing among the cast.

Prospero’s headlong, domineering style was continuing to cause resentment; Miss Edwards sang beautifully but was felt to be too sardonic for Ariel, especially when addressing Prospero, whom she disliked; and doubts concerning the curate’s interpretation of Caliban were felt by just about everyone.

Now they were nearing the end of Act Three.

Hippolito, who was played by a friend of Charles, had reached the final lines of the soliloquy in which he declares his intention of having as many women as he can, now that he has discovered that the creatures exist. He was doing rather well in the part, combining a certain foppishness of style with the erotic innocence of one who, kept in solitary confinement by Prospero on the Enchanted Isle, had never till now seen a specimen of womankind. Erasmus, who could not remember envying anyone anything before, found himself envying Hippolito’s assurance as he moved across to exit with the final words of the soliloquy: I now perceive that Prospero was cunning; For when he frighted me from womankind Those precious beings he for himself designed…

Erasmus knew that he must go directly, before the entry of Prospero and Miranda, and conceal himself in his cell. But he hesitated some moments longer, looking towards the parkland on the other side the lake, at the yellow of the new oak leaves, the stiff white cones of flower on the chestnuts, more vivid still for the lustreless surface of the leaves. Beyond was the gate in the wall, the ground sloping upward, a hawk wheeling high above…

“Time you were creeping, Kemp.” One of the several things about Bulstrode that others found irksome was his habit of trying to direct the play and the way he sought to disguise this under a cloak of facetiousness. “Into your den,” he added now with a false smile.

Erasmus gave him a glance of disdainful surprise before moving forward and ducking into the low structure of canvas and lath they had put up some yards back from the water. Sitting a little way inside it, he was invisible to Prospero and Miranda, who had now appeared by the lakeside. He heard Prospero utter the opening words of his speech with the gusty grandiloquence the tutor brought to the role: Your suit has pity in’t, and has prevailed.

Within this cave he lies, and you may see him…

Erasmus waited for this to come to an end, then counted to twelve, took a breath and began: “To be a prisoner where I dearly love is but a double-tie …”

The first lines did not tax him much, as they were addressed to himself and uttered within the solitude of his cave; he even achieved a certain declamatory force in their delivery. They were the truest of all his lines, the most truly expressive of his condition: Ferdinand’s captivity exactly coincided at this point with his own. He was a prisoner of the play itself; these rehearsals, so chafing to the natural haughtiness of his spirit, his subjection to the condescension of Parker and Bulstrode, these were labours he suffered for his jealous love. No one must replace him, no one else get a chance to play Miranda’s lover.