Sacred Hunger (23 page)

The Liverpool Merchant had crossed the latitude of Capo Blanco and was making steady way south-westward towards the Cape Verde Islands. As the air grew more languid, preparations for accommodating the negroes grew the more brisk. Men were set to work splicing the hawsers for a long anchorage and serving the ropes of the longboat; the hold was rummaged to make space between decks; the open woodwork of cross-battens and ledges that formed the covers of the hatchways had to be raised so as to give more light and air to the lower decks. The carpenter’s name was Barber and he had picked out Blair and Sullivan to help him with the gratings; it was customary now to employ these two together.

“Well,” Sullivan said, squatting to raise the framework on the starboard side, “a good deed lights a candle, as me sainted mother used to say, an” God will spy it sh’.”

“I thowt you’d given God his last chance the day they pressed you on to this here ship,” Billy Blair said. “Lift yor bleddy end a bit, will you? I never seen anyone like you for husbandin” his strength. What good deed are you talkin’ aboot?”’

‘By raisin” up these hatches we are deliverin’ parcels of light an’ air to the heathen below an’ sweetenin’ their passage. Some of thim fellers, a certain proportion of thim black fellers, will live to cut the sugar because of what we are after doin’ now. Isn’t that right, Mr Barber?”’

The carpenter, a morose, squat, long-armed man, said, ‘If talkin” was rated high, you would be Admiral of the Fleet by this time, Sullivan, instead of a ordinary seaman. We’ll have to take this right off altogether, so I can put a trim on it.”

‘allyou are wrong anyway,” Billy said. “As bleddy usual. We are just doin” what we was told to do. If they had said to lower the gratin’s an’ leave the beggars in the dark, we would ha’ done it just the same.”

Sullivan glanced up at the bright sky as if for patience. His hair had grown again after that drastic cropping. It stood up from his head in a thick, black, softly bristling mat. His long-jawed face had darkened with the sun, making the eyes seem more bemused than ever, straying after some vision just lost.

‘In that case,” he said, “since it would be a wilful act an” contrary to practice an’ with no grounds in reason or law, it would be a dastardly bad deed an’ ould Nick would make a note of it.”

At this flagrant illogicality Billy felt the onset of a familiar baffled fury. ‘I dunno how it is,” he said, doing his best to disguise this while at the same time holding up his end of the grating, “but any attempt at conversin” with you gets a man in a deadlock in no time.”

‘It is you, Billy,” Sullivan said mildly. “I niver arrive in deadlocks with nobody else.”

“Listen to me, for Christ’s sake.” Billy shifted on his haunches and spat over the rail.

“If it is a good deed to raise the gratin’s on these hatches,” he began slowly and laboriously, “what are we doin” puttin’ the quashees down there in the first place? Them fellers gets light an’ air enough in the forests where they are.”

‘This is commerce we are talkin” of now,”

Sullivan said. ‘It comes under a different headin” intirely.”

Billy felt the heat rise to his head. ‘now just a bleddy minute -“

“You are both of you iggerant beggars,” the carpenter said. “You ain’t been on a slaver before, have you?”’

Sullivan assumed a smile of patent falseness. “No, Mr Barber, we have not,” he said. “But we are dyin” to learn, ain’t we, Billy? I was just sayin’ the other day, I think it was to Dan’l Calley, who you see pickin’ yarn down there this very minute; he might seem slow, Dan’l, but he has an enquiring mind, an’ he was askin’ me somethin’ to do with the trade an’ I says to him, you better ask one of the officers, you better ask Jack Barber, I says, someone who knows the slavin’ business inside an’ out.”

The carpenter looked at him darkly for some moments, then he said, ‘allyou were both talking as if it is the men that will lie below here, but this grating is the one over the women’s room, not the men’s. We alius puts the men in the forward room, the boys in the middle and the women in the after part.”

“Now that is somethin” we niver had the slightest inklin’ of,” Sullivan said.

Billy Blair sat back on his heels and pushed the red cotton kerchief up over his heated forehead. He looked towards the waist where Calley and McGann were working together. Calley was sitting up against the gangway ladder, pulling out yarns, his big hands picking at the strands with surprising nimbleness, his blunt, seal-like head lowered in absolute concentration. He was naked to the waist, his powerful torso a smooth red-brown. The skinny McGann was working the hand winch to twist the yarns into rope. The doctor was beyond him, taking his walk on the weather side of the deck. Thurso and Barton stood talking together on the quarterdeck. The dry rattle of McGann’s spindle resounded through the ship—all the sound there was. Billy thought of the women and felt the rage of argument recede. ‘It hadna” come into my mind they would be separated,” he said. ‘The wimmin are below here, then?”’

“Aye, that’s right. You can get up to a hundred in there, if you stow ‘era spoon-fashion, arse by tit.”

“Bigob, a hundred black fannies,”

Billy said.

The weasel-faced Tapley, passing with a bucket of hot pitch, heard this and paused, grinning. “He thinks he’s goin” ter creep down when no one is lookin’ an’ shag hisself silly,” he said.

‘allyou shag off yourself with that bucket,” Barber said severely, jerking his thumb. He did not like anyone much, but Tapley less than most. “Nah,” he said to Billy, “you have to get them on their own if you want anything. On the deck maybe, or get one down in the room while they are exercising up here.

No good going below, ‘cept with a whip. They get into states, they get shrieking wild sometimes, specially when the weather is bad. They would have you down and chew your bollocks off.”

“Persuasion is best in any case,”

Sullivan said. “I know women, they are sensitive. A little bit of kindness goes a long way with women.”

Paris, turning at the end of his twenty paces, had observed Tapley’s brief pause with the bucket and his unpleasing smile. A distasteful fellow, Tapley. What was it? He seemed to have no nature of his own. In moral terms a rudimentary worm indeed, eyeless in the dark. Many of the men on board he had felt to be stricken in some way, made brutal or heedless by the circumstances of their lives; he had sensed some loss, something visited on them, feelings cauterized. But Tapley was without this emanation of a hurt or dispossessed creature: he writhed complete, his evils effortless. Or so, Paris thought, it seems to me. And what, after all, gives me the right to judge? And if indeed I have the right, what persuades me I can see the truth of another human being, and one with whom I have exchanged almost no words? Nothing persuades me in reason, and yet I know. Once again he was swept, desolated almost, by the lonely certainty of his perceptions.

He paused at the rail, looking eastward towards the invisible coast of Africa. Sight of land, when it came, would reduce them, set them once again on the margin of existence. Here, ringed round with the ocean horizons, one felt at the centre of the world.

The land, so much longed for, signifying the end of exile, would make them mere loiterers again. It came to him now that this paradox lay at the heart of all desire, as true for himself, standing perplexed at the rail, as for every other man on board, whatever Africa represented to him.

Not that all points of the horizon appeared equally far away, even to the casual and naked eye. He knew, he had seen in this succession of days, how there is always a point more distant in seeming than all others. Depending on the position of the sun and the distribution of light in the sky and the bulk and drift of cloud, one part of the rim will always be notched with remoteness.

Is this a notion of infinity? Paris wondered rather wildly, glancing round for it now, holding to the rail, feeling his body move with the sway of the ship.

Can such a notion derive from sense impression merely? So Locke would have it, with his denial of innate ideas. But the consolations of philosophy were limited, he found, aboard this ship. Locke defined pleasure as the reward of the just. What then should one call the emotion that lightened Libby’s face or brought a glint to the eyes of Haines, the boatswain?

He could hear the rattle of the winch from amidships.

A smell of hot pitch lay over the ship.

Simmonds was shouting orders for the fairweather sails to be hoisted. Paris found his remoter point and fixed his eyes upon it. The sun, concealed in cloud and low in the sky, made shafts and corridors and vaults to give infinity a baroque ornamentation, but it was there; random impurities swam in the depths and were dissolved.

Next day the slave rooms were marked off and work was begun on the forward bulkhead. The stateroom had already been stocked with an assortment of goods from the hold; now a new main topgallant sail was bent and the old one primed as soon as taken down with resin and oil, so as to make an awning for the quarterdeck, where the shipboard dealing would be conducted. Johnson, the gunner, began making cartridges for the swivel guns. Two hogsheads of spirits were drawn off, to sweeten the native dealers.

“Them fellers has got holler legs for the stuff,” Barton said to Paris, with the peering relish characteristic of him. “All the marrer has been lickified out of their bones, I do believe. An” there will be work to keep our lads off it, once it has been broached. A flogging won’t keep “em off drink, when the smell of it is about, any more than it will keep them off the women, Mr Paris. That is only human nature.”

And still Thurso did not know precisely where he was. He had seen no land since sighting the highlands of Tenerife. There was no means known to navigation, in that summer of 1752, which could have helped him to determine his longitude. The water continued a deep-sea colour, giving him hope he was not too much out in his reckoning. According to this he should have been at least fifty leagues north-west of Cape Still Ann. All the same, he was anxious. The banks lying off the cape were the dread of all Guinea traders. Thurso had encountered powerful indraughts there on previous voyages and he knew cases of ships drawn into the shallows, sported with by fickle breezes for days or weeks or grounded in the shoals. He took soundings in thirty fathoms and the lead showed coarse red sand and fragments of shell, indicating they were further eastward than he had expected, nearer the coast.

To make matters worse, the weather was thickening to the west. He gave immediate orders for the ship to be put about.

Hughes the climber, on lookout in the crow’s nest, heard the shouted orders and felt the ship quiver through her length as she was brought closer to the wind. A mackerel sky was building to westward, with dark banks of stormbreeders low on the horizon.

But there was some sun still, lying flat on the sea. He watched the gulls which earlier that day had found the ship.

They were following on the starboard side, fewer now, but in good number still, which made him think they were in for no more than light squalls. He tried to count the birds, but lost himself in the rising, dipping dance of their flight, the constant changing of position among them. Thirty at least, completely silent.

Sea-birds were mute at the approach of bad weather, he knew that about them and much else besides— whatever could be understood from close watching.

Animals and birds, any creatures other than human, he had always liked to watch. He noted again how the birds rode the wind, how the dying sun flashed on their breasts. Below them the sea was riven with gashes. The wind was rising. He looked away from the birds at last, to eastward. The horizon on that side was pale and clear still and Hughes saw, faint and ragged but unmistakable, the shapes of land. He cupped hands to mouth and bawled the fact to the darkening sky.

Thurso, standing forward of the helm, heard the cry from aloft and the boatswain’s long-drawn lamentation of response. “Whe-e-re aw-a-ay?”’ He did not wait for the lookout to answer but at once raised his glass. When the answer came, with a rough bearing to larboard, Thurso had already found them, shifting, evanescent, but no shapes of cloud or sea, a line of deep, irregular serrations. A rippling swell swept the ship up and dropped her and he lost his view. But he knew he had seen the mountains behind the Sherbro River; and in these moments of pause, in the cool breath before the onset of the squall, Thurso made proper acknowledgement to his counsellor for having brought them so far eastwards in deep water, beyond the sucking evil of the shoals.

Throughout the day the wind had been rising, smelling of rain on the way. It sent ruffles across the lake and swept up the spent May blossom into miniature storms. The cast of The Enchanted Island had assembled in the library, where a fire had been lit.

“We are all here, I think,” Charles Wolpert said, his accustomed gravity of manner contending with a certain visible embarrassment.

“Except for Parker, that is. He had duties in the parish—it seems the vicar has returned.

And of course, Mr Adams.” He paused on this to clear his throat before continuing. “I don’t want to beat about the bush. Mr Adams is threatening to leave us. In fact he talks of decamping on the spot. It appears that dissatisfaction has been expressed with his manner of directing the play. He doesn’t go into details but he names the person. I see no reason why we should not all know who it is.

It is Erasmus Kemp.”

Several people glanced at Erasmus now. He looked straight before him. His face wore a slight frown but he was otherwise impassive.

‘Good heavens.” Prospero had passed instantly to red-faced, swelling indignation. “That is a piece of barbarity,” he said. “What, did he presume to speak for us all?”’

“It seems that Mr Adams was intercepted,”

Charles said. “Is there anyone here you consulted beforehand, Kemp?”’

“No,” Erasmus said after a moment; he had had to struggle with himself to answer at all, in face of this public questioning. “It wasn’t the business of anyone else. I didn’t speak to Adams about his direction of the play. That is a lie. It was a personal matter. He had no business to complain to you.”