Sacred Hunger (16 page)

“Seized up, sir,” Haines reported.

Deakin, standing to starboard with the others of his watch, witnessed these preliminaries with a familiar sickness, compounded of his own old fear and pain. He knew that pride of refusing to be manhandled to the grating-doomed pride, because the flogging always brought a man to his knees. Deakin had been beaten and seen men beaten for almost as long as he could remember and he knew that the Yorkshireman would be given extra for raising his head and looking steady—not for spite, but because flogging was meant to reduce a man. On a slaveship it would not be the boatswain that would deliver the lashes, or either of the mates—the grievance would be too strong for this looser discipline. Officers and men had often to work side by side with their hands dipping in the same grease-tub. Things could happen that looked like accidents. Or a knife between the ribs and over the side and nobody the wiser… No, it would be the skipper. He was talking now, in his hoarse, unchanging voice. Deakin took in the sense without paying much attention to the particular words.

He had heard similar speeches on a dozen ships. Wilson had raised his hand against one of the appointed officers. This was to raise his hand against the captain himself. He, Thurso, was not the man to stand this. They did not know him yet. They would get to know him, by God. He could be a devil incarnate to them if they crossed him. If they went his way he could be sweet as honey. Let everyone see and take note what would befall them at any failure of duty or breach of discipline….

Thurso divested himself of his coat and waistcoat, handing them to Barton, who came forward for them like a valet. Haines was undoing the red baize bag in which the cat was kept. To Paris, already bracing himself for what was to come, there was a horrifying elegance in this ritual disrobing, despite the incongruities of the captain’s thick figure and his big, square, weatherbeaten face. He might have been in his changing-room at a levee, his attendants about him, his petitioners below.

He took the whip from Haines and stepped down the companion. He measured his distance, took two short steps and struck with full power of his arm. They heard the swish of the tails and the pattering crack of the impact. A loud, deep panting sound came from Wilson as the breath was driven from his body by the force of the blow. Paris saw the tendons of the man’s neck tighten with his effort to make no sound. The first blow had opened his back and a broken line of blood showed where the knots had cut. Thurso delivered stroke after stroke with unfaltering ferocity and astounding energy, his eyes staring and his face dark red and swollen-looking. Wilson still made no sound but he writhed against the grating. His back was a red slough from neck to waist. Drops of blood were scattered over the deck with each stroke. At the tenth, and each one thereafter, Thurso was obliged to pause in order to run his fingers through the tails of the cat to free them from blood and bits of flesh. The fourteenth blow broke Wilson’s resolve. His knees gave and he hung by his wrists. “Oh God,” he shouted thickly. “God help me.”

“Aye,” Thurso said, shaking drops over the deck. He had stains of blood on the sleeve and shoulder of his shirt. There were beads of sweat on his face and his chest was rising and falling heavily. “You are singing now, are you? You had better call on Thurso, he is nearer.”

It was what he had been waiting for. Wilson was a hardy ruffian but he had known he must give way. He took the count to eighteen, however, before throwing the whip to the boatswain. “Clear the thongs well for the next man that forgets himself,” he said, and stumped back up the companion. “Cut the man down, Mr Barton, and send the crew about their duties. Tell Morgan I want hot water brought to my cabin on the instant.”

Freed from the grating, Wilson collapsed at once upon the deck, his eyes fixed and his face darkly congested, Paris saw him half led and half carried below by two men. He stood for some moments struggling to master his disgust and indignation. It came to him that he could assert his will against this brute in a way that poor Wilson, with no privileged exemptions, had not been able to, and so give some dignity to those lacerations. He stepped forward to face the captain. “Excuse me, Captain Thurso,” he said. “I should like the favour of a word with you.”

He met the captain’s eyes and saw something vacant in them for the moment, the sort of vacancy that sometimes comes after strong effort or emotion. “It is not convenient at present,” Thurso said.

“Sir, this is the third time of asking and I have a right to be heard.”

“A right?”’ Thurso said. “What do you mean?”’ His tone had quickened. “Do you talk to me about rights, here on my deck?”’

Paris felt a violent contempt rise in him as he met the renewed glare in the other’s eyes. So strong was the feeling that he had consciously to caution himself, discipline himself physically. He clasped his hands together behind his back. “Yes, sir, I do,” he said. He rested his eyes steadily on Thurso and saw something change in the other’s expression as the antagonism was registered. “I am referring to the question of the sick bay. It has not been cleared yet, in spite of my former requests to you. Now there is a clear case of need for it.”

“Sick bay?”’ Thurso glared up at his listless topsails for a moment. “Are you mad, Mr Paris? What need is there now for it when we have no sickness aboard?”’

“I intend to treat that man’s back,” Paris said. ‘His lacerations could easily become putrid if not attended to.”

“Wilson? God damn my blood,”

Thurso said violently. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at you. I have seen a hundred like him treated well enough with a handful of salt.”

Paris hesitated. He had not wanted to use his uncle’s name, but he was set on winning the day—and not for his own sake only. He said, ‘allyou compel me to remind you that Mr Kemp intended me to have the use of that room. He so stated and in your hearing.”

He saw that Thurso had clenched his right fist so that the knuckles whitened. At the sight, with a reciprocal impulse of violence he did not know he possessed, and which he was afterwards to think of as some infection of madness, he advanced his face and brought his hands to his sides. “I want that sick bay cleared, sir, if you please,” he said.

‘allyes, I thought we should hear of your uncle before long.” Thurso seemed about to say more, but suddenly his expression changed and he lifted his head.

“There, can you hear it?”’ he said.

“Hear what?”’

“The wind, you fool.”

Listening now more intently, Paris heard a tune in the rigging that he did not think had been there before, and a moment later he felt a breeze against his face.

There was a series of rippling sounds as the canvas began to fill out.

“You can have your precious sick bay if it matters so much,” Thurso said with contempt. He felt the wind increasing, felt the responsive gathering of the ship. It came again, stronger, singing through the ropes, a harmony of high-pitched tones, transmitted to the chains and thence through all the timbers. And it was coming from the west. “You see, it is answered,” he said, turning away. “We have freed the wind.”

“What do you mean?”’

No answer came to this. The captain’s face had relaxed into lines of fatigue. He was looking down to the foot of the gangway, where drops of Wilson’s blood still glistened.

Erasmus waited for an occasion when his father was in relaxed mood—occasions rarer these days than he had ever known them to be. He chose one evening after supper when his father, at ease in skull-cap and dressing-gown, was smoking a pipe or two in the small, oak-panelled sanctum he called his study.

“Can you spare me some minutes, sir?”’

Kemp, observing for a while in silence the military posture that his son had adopted, head up and shoulders braced back, was brought to mind of other occasions, going back to earliest childhood, when Erasmus had stood before him thus. Unexpectedly, and in the midst of his anxieties, he found himself visited by compassion for this self-willed son of his, for whom life had always been a succession of self-imposed tests and ordeals. Just in this way, he thought, Erasmus will bear himself at the news of my ruin, if it comes.

“Yes, of course, my boy,” he said.

“What is it?”’

“I want to ask Sarah Wolpert to marry me,” Erasmus said, looking straight before him.

‘That is, I want to ask her father…” He stumbled a moment. “I want to ask for her hand. I wished to know if you had any objections to such a course, sir.”

‘Wolpert’s daughter?”’ Kemp was taken aback. He had noticed an increased interest in clothes on his son’s part; the boy took longer over the dressing of his hair and the tying of his neckcloth; but Erasmus had always been fastidious about his linen and careful of his appearance and was now at a foppish age. He knew his son had been going a good deal to the Wolpert house but there was the play to account for this and Wolpert had a boy only slightly younger than Erasmus.

“I suspected nothing of it,” he said. “I have been much preoccupied of late. Besides, you are secretive—you always have been so. You do not come to me with your feelings, only your decisions.” If there was reproach in this it was mainly for himself, for his failure to notice. Nevertheless, he felt immediate compunction for it. “Well, it is your way,” he said.

“Are you displeased with me, sir?”’

“No, I am not displeased. Our natures are different in this respect. I would stop to look at something, take soundings, before my course was so far set. Now I see this business is screwed to such pitch that I could not oppose it without damage.”

He saw nothing on his son’s face to indicate any appreciation of this. The boy still stood braced there. “Come, sit down,” he said. “Here, by me.

You keep to your purposes, that is not so bad a thing.

But you are young to be married. And the girl cannot be more than eighteen.”

“She is not yet eighteen, sir.”

“It is young,” Kemp said slowly. Something had changed in his tone, now that surprise had faded, giving time for a glimpse of the implications. These expanded in his mind as he looked at the level-browed, intensely serious face close to his own. “On the other hand,” he said, “your mother was barely seventeen when we were married. I cannot spare you from the business,” he added after a moment.

“There would be no need,” Erasmus said. The interview was not proceeding as expected—he was surprised to find his father so amenable—but this last objection he had anticipated. “The match would do good for us. The combination of the families would make a powerful force, with the town growing so fast.”

Kemp nodded, as if this thought had only now occurred to him. “That is so,” he said. “The connection would be of benefit to both.” With some appearance of effort he met his son’s eyes, so like his own. “It is what you want?”’ he said.

“I am set on her.”

Kemp was silent for a long moment, looking down.

Then he raised a face grown suddenly haggard.

‘allyou have my consent,” he said.

It took a further week for Erasmus to discover the right circumstances, poise and apparel for his interview with Sarah’s father. It was not nerve he had to summon —he had enough of that at his command—but humility, the readiness to demean himself, as he saw it, by stating his desires and seeming to petition for their legitimacy.

He would have felt this whoever the man had been; he had felt it, to some degree, even with his father.

Love had not so far made him happy. His intention, the fixing of his will on the girl, he experienced as an affliction. His whole being seemed tender, painful to the slightest touch—even at times, the touch of air itself. The impressions of his senses came as blows to his heart, strangely similar to those of loss or violation. In this vulnerable state he experienced the burgeoning of the season like a man set on bruising himself. Never had he noted the symptoms of summer with such particularity. As he saw to the unloading of the pack-trains on the waterfront, or the weighing and recording of cotton bales in the yard behind the family warehouses, he heard the cuckoos calling from the market gardens of Wallasey across the water, all regret and all promise mingled in their notes. In the wood by the lake the bluebells came in swathes and the ash trees emerged from winter overnight, as it seemed, and were hung with reddish, plumy flowers.

He took particular care with his dress the evening of his visit: an immaculate exterior reduced the appearance of suing. He chose a suit of dark satin, short in the sleeve to show the plaited linen of his shirt cuffs, a white waistcoat and black, pointed-toed shoes in the latest fashion. He had powdered his hair lightly and tied it behind with a long black ribbon; and instead of the usual short hanger, he wore his best sword with the silver chasing on the hilt.

“I love your daughter, sir,” he heard himself saying, sitting bolt upright on his chair. “I want to marry her.” It sounded angry, almost. He had been unable so far to see any reaction on the broad face before him or in the shrewd, deliberate brown eyes which regarded him now for some moments in silence.

‘Do you so?”’ the merchant said at last. He had come from business and was still in outdoor attire, full-skirted cotton summer coat, buff waistcoat, old-fashioned wig with a roll of curls above the ears. “And she, how does she view the matter?”’

“I think she is not averse to me.”

“Is that a way of saying there is already an understanding between you?”’

The question was deliberately disingenuous; he knew already of the young man’s interest: it had been expressed to him by Sarah herself. And he knew to what extent the girl had responded. But Erasmus’s hasty manner inclined him to temporize, partly from the long habit of bargaining, partly because he had been roused to some hostility by it. “I am asking if you have spoken together,” he said rather sharply.

‘There is no understanding, sir,” Erasmus said.

“But she has given me reason to hope.”

Wolpert considered for some moments. Though phlegmatic in manner, he was acute, particularly where it concerned him nearly. His daughter was a source of delight to him and he treasured her deeply. There was no timidity in the bearing of the young man before him, no personal deference towards himself.