Sacred Hunger (26 page)

No human agency was evident. It was like some breeding of vapours out there, where the spray made the atmosphere vague.

Haines, the boatswain, came quickly towards them. “What are you doing here?”’ he said fiercely to Deakin and Calley. “How long does it take you to wring out a few swabs? You pair of lazy sons of whores, wasn’t you ordered aft to lend a hand with the boat?”’

“I detained them in talk,” Paris said quickly. There had been insolence towards himself in this violent incursion—Haines had addressed the men without a glance in his direction. “Do you hear me, Haines? I say it was I who kept them there.”

He encountered the glittering, close-set eyes of the boatswain and caught the slightly rank odour of the oil he used on his abundant ringlets. Haines was wearing a sleeveless calico waistcoat and the muscles at his shoulders and arms flexed smoothly as he struck lightly with the side of a hand against the gunwale. There was a constant bitter energy about him, as if—or so it seemed to Paris—the boatswain was recharged by the abuse and blows he distributed.

“Talking is for below, not for men on deck,” he said. “There is work still to be done, Doctor. We shall have visitors before long, judging by the smoke they are sending up.”

“I know it. I was only intending to say that it was my doing that these two were delayed.”

With the barest of nods, Haines turned away and went aft again, to where the longboat was hoisted out between the fore-and mainmasts. Cavana and Sullivan were packing oakum into her scams and ramming the yarns home as close as they could with fingers and short chisels, Wilson following behind with mallet and spike to drive the wadding in tighter. McGann was tending a small iron brazier, which stood alongside on the deck with a cauldron of steaming pitch on it. The air above the brazier rippled with heat and the flat, muffled blows of the mallet echoed over the ship.

With Haines’s eye upon them they worked in silence, but he was summoned by the captain after some minutes.

On the strength of the signal fires and the absence for the moment of rival traders, Thurso had decided to moor with the sheet anchor and stay some time here.

Sullivan straightened himself up as soon as the boatswain had turned his back. “McGann has the best of it,” he said without rancour. “I am destroyin’ me finger ends on this rope. I’ll niver be able to play the fiddle if me fingers is reduced to stumps. I will have the law of thim for takin’ away me livelihood. McGann has the best of it, he is just sittin’ there. Tendin’ fires is an easy lay, as the black spy knows well.”

McGann, from his position beside the brazier, exposed appalling teeth in a grin which contained no smallest element of sympathy. ‘Get your misbegot backs into it,” he said in what seemed an attempt to imitate the boatswain’s menacing utterance.

“Who is the black spy when he is at home?”’ Cavana said. “Are you talking about that pissfire Haines?”’

“I’m talkin” about the divil,” Sullivan said. ‘All he needs is a poker an” tongs.”

“I have sworn to cripple the bastid,”

Wilson said.

“No use nursin” a grudge,”

Sullivan said. “I know Haines got you a noggin” but broodin’ on it will only shorten your life. I niver bear a grudge meself. They took me clothes off me against me will but I don’t let it darken me days. Haines took six brass buttons off me coat, an’ that is property we are talkin’ of now. A noggin’ heals up, but thim brass buttons is worth money, it comes under a different headin’ intirely. One o’ these days I am goin’ to walk up an’ ask him what he done with thim buttons. I am waitin’ for the right moment.”

McGann raised himself to look towards the land.

‘That smoke is comin” from inside, by the look of it,” he said. ‘They hae got slaves there for sure. The captain will be sendin” the boat upriver, like as not. But you are better off stayin’ aboard if you can. It is killin’ hot inside there, out the wind.”

The first to see the shore fires had been Hughes.

He reported it to Simmonds, who went with the news to the stateroom where captain and first mate were checking trade goods. Thurso nodded, without change of expression. ‘Send someone up to the mainmast trestles,” he said, in his hoarse and penetrating voice. “Send Hughes. Tell him to keep his eyes peeled. I want to know the moment they put out from shore. Those two men in irons, Blair and Libby, they can be released now. I don’t want men in irons sitting about the deck when any of these local chiefs come aboard. It gives a bad impression. They don’t understand any process of law or proper punishment, they think it is all done on a whim, as they do things. I know these people, Simmonds.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you may tell Blair and Libby that they are lucky to get off so lightly. They can do their blood-letting on shore. If there is any more of it on board my ship I will take the skin off their backs.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

“That little ‘un is a goer,” Barton remarked, as soon as the second mate had left. “He landed one or two good’uns on Libby.”

“Why do you talk to me of that?”’ Thurso said, turning sharply upon him. “What is it to me? They will be here shortly. We have hit upon a good moment.

There are no other ships anywhere in the offing or to seaward of us, which cannot long be the case. I believe they will have prime slaves in their pens there. We shall have to do what trade we can as speedily as may be. But hark you, Barton, I will not pay over the odds for them.”

“No, Captain.”

“I will not go a penny over the market.”

Barton raised a thin and cautious face among the bales of brightly coloured fabrics and the shining rows of pans and kettles. The captain was becoming a talker these days. He glanced with accustomed stealthy dislike at Thurso’s impassive face and raw-looking blue eyes. Barton was sensitive to impressions and it seemed to him now that the captain was making assurances to somebody not in the room at all.

‘It would not do to pay over the odds, sir,” he said softly.

“I am up to their tricks,” Thurso said.

‘There isn’t a man knows these waters better, nor the quality of the blacks here. They are rascals but I will be too much for them as I have always been before. They will find Saul Thurso always a jump ahead. I have never sold my owners short and I am not going to begin now, with the last one. He sends his nephew to spy on me, but I will do my best for him just the same. This is a hard trade and there are disappointments in it that could break a man’s spirit and blight his hopes who is weak enough to allow it.” He fell silent here, looking in dark abstraction at strings of glass beads hanging before him.

“It has broke men’s hearts, Captain, to my sartin knowledge,” Barton said after a moment. “But we have a first-rate selection of goods here, upon my soul, there is what would please the most contrary and pernacious animal among ‘em. An” some of “em are pernacious difficult to please, as you an” I both know, Captain, havin’ been -“

‘What I know is not in your province,”

Thurso said, rousing himself. “You keep to your place and I’ll keep to mine. I am just talking to you at present, Barton, that is all. We are in business together for the gold dust, as agreed. That is as far as things go between us.”

“Yes, sir.” Seeing Thurso’s head lowered again in a return of that dark musing, Barton allowed his face to fall into an expression of faintly smiling indifference.

So the two men stood for some time in silence in that festooned and cluttered emporium, surrounded by goods of extraordinary variety: hanging strings of yellow glass beads, copper bands threaded together, rolls of tobacco, cases of muskets, brass basins and copper pots, iron bars, linen handkerchiefs, pewter mugs, silk ramalls, bright red and deep blue bafts, chintzes, checked cottons, knives and cutlasses and gold-laced hats.

Paris, approaching from the hatchway, glancing round the open door, saw them thus—standing silent in this cave of treasures, among coloured stuffs and shining surfaces—and he had an immediate feeling that these two also were on display, among the objects of commerce. This lasted only a moment. Then Thurso raised his head and saw him and said, “Well, it is our doctor,” with the usual intonation of sarcasm.

But Paris could not return so soon to the tone of their everyday dealings. Whether he knew it or not, Thurso for the moment was transformed: bareheaded here, with his square-set figure and greyish poll, his attention momentarily disabled or distracted among sheen of cloth and gleam of metal, the reflecting surfaces of knife blades and mirrors and beads, it was possible to think of him as a stout and deferential ironmonger or draper comalm Paris expected to see an apron on him. Then he turned his head, the light fell on the square cage of his temples and jaws and the trapped and furious eyes within it, and the impression vanished.

Paris began to speak, but he was interrupted by a sharp, wailing cry from above.

“There they are,” Thurso said. “Mr Barton, I want the brandy we drew off hoisted below the quarterdeck awning. I want you to speak to Johnson and make sure he primes the swivel guns. The small arms will remain under lock and key, but you and Simmonds and Haines will carry pistols, if you please.”

“Aye-aye, sir.” Barton was already out of the room and making for the hatchway.

“As for you, sir,” Thurso said, “I shall want you up on deck with me. You had better wear your hat. Hats always impress these people. A naked-headed man is not rated so high with them.”

He had himself donned a cocked hat. Under its shadow his eyes seemed to have retreated further.

Something like a smile touched the corners of his mouth.

‘allyou may find yourself with something to do at last, Mr Paris,” he said.

Paris went back to his cabin to fetch his hat.

He had only the low-crowned black one which he had worn on his visit to the Kemps and which had, unknown to him, aroused such antipathy in his cousin Erasmus. He put it on, for lack of anything more imposing, and ascended hastily to the deck.

Here for the moment there seemed only what there had been before, the hot sun, the welcome breath of the northern trade wind, the distant thunder of the surf.

The tapping of Wilson’s mallet continued to be heard, there was a smell of hot pitch and black fumes of it were hanging everywhere. Standing on the afterdeck some yards from Thurso, he heard the boatswain order McGann to take the cauldron off but leave the brazier in place and keep it fed.

Looking towards the shore, he saw at first nothing different. There were the changing depths of the water, marked by shifts to paler colours; the plunge and seethe of the waves as they broke on the shore and the distant iridescence of the spray, which was flung high —higher than the level of the deck, as high as the ship’s cross-trees, it seemed. Beyond this was the veiled forest.

Straining his eyes through the dazzle of the surf, he saw at last the dark shape of the canoe, rising up to the line of sight like a piece of sediment in a shaken bottle. It rode a crest for appreciable moments on a course slightly athwart the ship. He heard or seemed to hear the blare of some instrument like a trumpet and a rapid pattering of drums. Then the canoe had plunged into a trough among the waves and vanished from view as completely as if it had never been, as if the sight of it had been mere illusion, product of strained eyes, trick of light.

It was in this dream-like interlude that Paris knew suddenly why this coast had seemed in a way familiar amidst all its disturbing strangeness, why he had felt at first sight of it something tug at his memory. Those parallels of colour and light had reminded him of his boyhood in Norfolk, fishing from a rowboat, looking shoreward when the tide was on the ebb, the pale striations of the shallows, the constant fret of surf and strips of half-dried sand beyond, pale gold, with stretches of gleaming wet between, layer on layer, always merging and always distinct. Like the plumage of a bird, he thought, like wing feathers…

He felt homesick, desperate for a refuge.

In these few moments, with the canoe still lost to sight, an urgent desire for escape came upon him—not only, he realized, from the thraldom of the present and the ordeal he sensed coming. The scenes he had remembered belonged to his youth, to the days of his courtship; he had come with Ruth to those beaches in the early days of his marriage. It was what had happened to Ruth that he wanted to flee from, his part in it, the desolation of his life. These seemed connected, in a way he could not properly understand, with what he now stood waiting for. Somewhere within him words of a prayer formed, drop by drop, as if by some process of distillation independent of his will: Take this from me, let nothing more be required of me, let me go back to the time before such things were done, such things were possible… But he knew there was no such time.

The canoe rose to sight again, nearer now and more distinct, broadside to the ship, and Paris saw that it was indented or fretted with heads. He had time to notice, before the craft bobbed down again, the processional, frieze-like effect of this, enhanced by what seemed some shared and ceremonial burden. At the prow a man was sitting upright, wearing a high-crowned hat. One of that frieze of heads raised a tubular object as though to drink. The bugle blast came again over the water.

They watched as the long canoe was steered through the zone of the surf with amazing dexterity. In the calmer water her progress was swifter and more direct.

Soon she was lying alongside.

The hatted figure at the prow had got to his feet, holding to the ship’s accommodation ladder for balance. He was a tall, obese man, the colour of dry clay. In addition to his gold-laced tricorn hat he wore a pair of linen drawers, a cutlass and a necklace of feathers. He was flanked by several men armed with muskets. One of these had also a drum between his knees and another a small bugle round his neck. All of them, chief and escort, were smiling broadly.

Paris looked down at the bound figures in the waist of the long canoe. That frieze of heads had been theirs. There were ten of them, five men, two boys, two women, and a girl, all completely naked. They sat in silence, their arms bound behind them and their heads forced upright by means of a common yoke: it was the projections of this that had looked so strangely ceremonial at a distance. They were lighter in colour than the boatmen, who were coal black and heavy-browed, and had a muscular development of chest and arms such as Paris had never seen before. He could see the deep rise and fall of their breathing as they rested on the long paddles. He saw that Barber, the carpenter, was standing near and remembered he was an old hand on slaveships.