Sacred Hunger (21 page)

Paris remained silent for a short while, looking out to sea. The African coast lay somewhere to the east of them, in the direction of the moon—it seemed to him now that the ship was keeping to the broad track of moonlight. The sails were blanched. He made out a dark figure sitting alone in the cross-timbers of the mainmast and wondered if it were Hughes, who often sat there at night. He sensed the attentiveness of the man waiting beside him. The mate’s question had come concealed in praise. Barton had a nose for weakness, for the festerings of spirit; and he was subtle enough to know that dislike is no impediment to confidences, that men of a certain cast of mind will confide even where they distrust, because not to do so shows fear or shame.

“Them was your words, I think,” the mate said softly.

“Yes,” Paris said, “a physician sees a good deal of life, you know.”

He saw Barton relax his shoulders as if in some release of tension. The mate paused a moment, then said in a different tone, “All the same, he was right, the captain was right.”

“In what way?”’

“There is nothin” like fear for keeping men together.

Nothin’ else will do it, not on a slaveship. It is one of the chief snags of the trade that the merchandise has a tendency to rise on you. You wait till we have got upwards of two hundred negroes chained between decks, all of’em ready to dash your brains out if they gets a chance, an’ twenty men to guard “era, feed ‘em, wash ‘em down, exercise ‘em up on deck. By God, Mr Paris, then you will see what fear can do to a man of learnin” an’ scallership. It will bring him down to the level of the lowest scum aboard what can’t write his own name.”

Barton’s pipe was finished. With a gesture curiously dandified he took a silver thimble from his waistcoat pocket, fitted it on his little finger and pressed out the last spark in the bowl. The tone of these last words had been hostile—perhaps through disappointment at his failure to draw Paris out; but he now raised his face again in the peering way characteristic of him, almost benevolent-seeming.

Moonlight caught the thimble in a running gleam as he returned it to his pocket. ‘allyes,” he said, “you will know which side you are on, whatever you meant in there. You will live in fear like the rest.”

He nodded, still smiling, and turned to go below. “It smells of hexcrement,” he said. “You will get to know the smell, because them two hundred or so blacks will be shittin” in fear too.”

Paris stayed alone on deck some minutes longer, then returned to his cabin. He was too disturbed in mind to think immediately of sleeping. It seemed to him that he had grown more impressionable in these last weeks, more easily affected by what he felt emanating from others. He looked more closely and saw more—not by conscious intention but somehow helplessly. Increasingly of late he had felt drawn into conflict with Thurso, a struggle too mortal for their short acquaintance: it was as if they had recognized each other as heirs to some ancient feud. Just now, on deck, Barton’s rhetoric had oppressed him, and the moral vacancy he felt behind it. The mate had a sort of degraded subtlety about him, a scavenger’s instinct for scents of weakness. And Paris felt himself that it was a weakness, this vulnerability to impression, this too-strong sense of other human beings comalm like a failure of manhood. He blamed it on his isolation. In the removal of all that was customary in his life, some customary skin of protection also had gone, it seemed.

He found solace for the spirit now in De Motu Cordis. The Latin text acted on him these days with the power of incantation. He had earlier been labouring to do justice to Harvey’s paean to the heart’s pre-eminence towards the end of chapter eight: Just as the sun deserves to be called the heart of the world, so is the heart the sun of the microcosm and the first principle of life, whose virtue quickens the blood and keeps it free from all taint of corruption…

It was not, he reflected, that the analogy was original; the notion of the heart as the sun of man’s being was an ancient one, deriving from Aristotle; but if you are about to demonstrate, for the first time, the difference between veins and arteries and explain how the blood is transferred from the vena cava to all parts of the body, you may be allowed to borrow your comparisons at least.

There were other great men, of course, who didn’t.

Paris thought while preparing for bed of Newton and that confession of ignorance in which he compares himself to a small boy playing with pebbles by the shore of a great unknown sea.

This led him, by a leap he did not pause to examine, to thoughts of his cousin Erasmus and that lonely struggle of the eight-year-old boy to make the elements conform to his will. Memory of it came first in a wide perspective—the empty beach, the grey sea, the small, intent figure. Then, in one of those swooping approaches sometimes experienced in dreams, he drew near, saw the white face, the bloodied fingers… There was nothing in common here with Newton’s image of human limitation.

Erasmus had wanted to subdue the world. Paris recalled what Barton had said of Thurso a short while ago: he takes it all personal. But that staring child had no world to command, no ship, no community of men to wrench to the shape of his obsession.

Perhaps because of his quickened thoughts, sleep did not come to him, despite the cradling motion of the vessel.

He lay staring up through a darkness so profound that it cancelled all sense of confine; the deck above him was no nearer than the spaces of the sky beyond and the planets in their obedient courses. Docile these too, he thought, as subject to law as the motions of my heart, the flight and homing of the blood. Even in its rages nature was always captive. Man too, led in shackles from the womb. Death is a corruption which befalls by defect of heat, so Harvey defined it. Between the warm and the cold the body flushes a certain number of times. Ruth’s body corrupted by defect of heat prematurely. Again he was harrowed by the thought that it was the unborn child that had nourished the mother.

In prison I was subject also to defect of heat, he thought, remembering the stone floor, the bare walls. At this interval of time Norwich Jail had assumed the shape of a pit in his mind, with descending levels of damnation. At the lowest level were those who had no money at all and small means of obtaining any.

He had been one week here, on the orders of the outraged cleric who owned the prison, as punishment for printing seditious views concerning God’s creation. Here men and women fought with rats in damp cellars for scraps of food thrown down to them through a trap-door, and huddled together for warmth upon heaps of filthy rags and bundles of rotten straw.

Lunatics stumbled about here, women gave birth, people died of fever or starvation.

These were people yielding no profit. Higher in the scale were those who could pay for food and a private room and it was here that Paris, until redeemed by his uncle, had found lodging. Two shillings a week had provided him also with writing materials and given him access to the prisoners” common-room, where there were newspapers, and a fire in the coldest weather; but it had not been enough to free him from the stench of the place, nor the brutalities of some of his fellow-inmates—thieves and pimps mingled with debtors here. Higher yet, serenely above all this and freed from unpleasant associations, were the rich prisoners, who lived as the bishop’s guests and entertained on a lavish scale.

Norwich Jail had given Paris his notion of hell, and its workings afforded an example of docility to law every bit as absolute as the motions of the blood postulated by Harvey. Money regulated every smallest detail of the place, from the paupers in the cellars to the profligate feasters above. All rents went to the bishop, who had spent a thousand pounds to acquire the prison and was laudably set on making his investment as profitable as possible, this being a time when the individual pursuit of wealth was regarded as inherently virtuous, on the grounds that it increased the wealth and well-being of the community. Indeed, this process of enrichment was generally referred to as “wealth-creation” by the theorists of the day. The spread of benefits was not apparent in the prison itself, owing to the special circumstances there and particularly to the very high death-rate.

The keepers at their lower level sought to emulate the governor, pursuing wealth diligently through the sale of spirits, the purveying of harlots and the extortionate charges to visitors. The visits had been an ordeal for Ruth, he remembered now. She was prone to nausea in the first period of the pregnancy and the smell of the place had sickened her. She came with a handkerchief soaked in vinegar and held it from time to time to her nostrils. He remembered her face on the last of these visits, angry and distressed: she had been searched and subjected to indignities by the foul-mouthed viragos in the prison lodge on the pretext she was a whore, and robbed by them of a scarf.

He had told her to keep up her courage, told her he would be free soon.

Wide-eyed in the darkness, he saw, or feared to see, the distress on Ruth’s face turn to reproach. He sought for a shield and found one in the absurd and terrified appearance of a young debtor called Deever whose head had been thrust through the legs of a chair by his fellow-inmates of the common-room for his inability to pay chummage—the obligation to buy spirits for the company that was laid on all new arrivals. In this place of misery and shame, they aped the manners and adopted the ritual of those who had condemned them. Witnesses were sworn with due ceremony, counsel made their pleas on one side and the other. A burly thief with a towel tied up in knots in imitation of the judge’s wig solemnly pronounced the sentence… It was Deever’s face that Paris saw now as a refuge from Ruth’s, ashamed and fearful, looking from his cage at the tormentors who were his fellow-prisoners too…

So he lay sleepless, trying out versions of the past that might be tolerable to his imagination, while the deck above him lay awash with moonlight and the ship made steady way with all sails set and a following sea. In this warmer weather some of the crew found sleeping space on the deck. Calley, huddled in his blanket amidships, groaned in his sleep, beset by horrors. He started up at last, to stare affrighted across the moonlit deck, his face dewed with sweat. He had woken Deakin, who hissed at him, but Calley was still in the toils of nightmare and could not properly hear.

“What is wrong with you?”’ Deakin asked.

“Why don’t you sleep and give us some peace?

There, get under your blanket.”

“It came out my mouth,” Calley said. He was shivering. “Comin” out an’ never stop.”

‘What are you talking about?”’

“This white worm come out my mouth.”

“What worm?”’

“Africa worm. Long white un”. You swallers it in the water; you can’t see it when you drinks, it is too little. It gets bigger in your stomick an’ it fills up with eggs an’ it comes out to lay the eggs in the water. It can come out anywhere, it can come out your nose, it can come out your belly-button.”

‘Who told you that?”’

“They toFrom me.” Calley never mentioned names. His eyes started round the deck. “It knows when you go near the water,” he said with wonder—he was calmer now. “One come out his eye, that’s why he only got one eye. It can come out your ear, it can-“

“Keep your voice down,” Deakin said. “You ought to have more sense, Dan’l. They were only trying to frighten you with them stories. You don’t drink standing water anywhere in those parts where we are going. You stick by me, you won’t get no worms.” He looked across the deck for some moments in silence. Then he said, “We will run, Dan’l. You and me. First chance we get. We will get clear of this ship.”

He had never included anyone else in his plans before. Since the day of his quarrel with Libby he had known that he would have to run. No ship ever left harbour with a crew that could all be trusted. Haines or Libby or someone else would turn him in for the bounty as soon as they came up with a navy ship.

Or the captain would hand him over in the West Indies to save wages on the voyage home.

Once they had unloaded the negroes there would be no need for so many men. There might be a naval frigate at anchor in Kingston harbour. In any case, he could not wait to find out. For desertion he could expect two hundred lashes and he did not believe he could survive so many. He would rather take his chance ashore. “When we get the chance,” he said. “When we get to Africa, you and me will run.

But you must keep mum about it.”

“It can come out your arse,” Calley said. Fear had receded now but he was unwilling to part with the horror of the worm altogether. “It can come out your nose,” he whispered, round-eyed in the moonlight.

“Leave off that tack, will you? You and me will run.

We will wait for our chance. Don’t you talk about this to anybody.”

“Will we get some o” them black cunnies?”’

‘allyou’ll get nothing if you blab. You will get a flogging. Do you hear me, Dan’l?”’ As always he saw himself breaking through. But this time not alone. There would be a place, dark among trees, where they could hide until all search was over. This would part like a screen and they would pass into the open, into light… “I will look after you,” he said. ‘But you will get nothing if you blab. You will get a flogging.”

“I won’t blab,” Calley said. He struggled for a moment with the idea of it. ‘What will we do there?”’

“Do? We will get into trade, we will set up for ourselves.” He did not care, really, he was occupied only with thoughts of parting the screen, stepping through into the open, taking possession of the space. He spoke in whispers to the round-eyed Calley. There was a trade in ivory and camwood and gold dust. With money they could take passage from Sierra Leone to Georgia or Carolina…

His whispers went on, lulling Calley to sleep again, becoming briefly part of the life of the ship, the play of shadows over the decks, the slow creak of the boom, the faint language of the canvas and ropes.

To these sounds the captain, released for a while from his demon, slept in his cabin; Hughes the climber slept wrapped in his blanket in the fore topmast staysail and Thomas True in his hammock in the forecastle, lying face down to save his torn back.