Sacred Hunger (29 page)

Yellow Henry appeared to meditate for some moments, stretching his mouth and distending his nostrils in an expression half savage, half humorous.

His face glistened. Some quality of stillness had invested the men flanking him. “Brumgem muskit take off man fingah,” he said at last.

Apparently deciding to make a joke of it, he pouted and puffed explosively into the air, blinking rapidly and raising a hand to follow the track of his breath. “G’bye fingah,” he said. There was laughter at this among his men. He turned his heavy shoulders to look round at them. “Show dem Brumgem muskit,” he said.

Two of the men, smiling radiantly, raised their right hands. Each had a forefinger missing and one had lost also the first joint of his thumb. At the sight there was a whooping clamour of merriment from the king’s retainers.

Yellow Henry himself was overcome by laughter.

When he looked up there were thick tears in his eyes.

“Why you laughin”?”’ he said. ‘Why you make big yai? Dey lucky, still got hans.”

Paris looked from the grinning faces to the mutilated hands. It seemed suddenly swelteringly hot, as if the clouds had hushed the wind. A sensation of nausea came to him, like the onset of some long-suspected disease. Taking advantage of the general release of tension in the wake of Yellow Henry’s joke, he passed down on to the main deck, where the slaves already branded and shackled were grouped together, and thence to his cabin.

Once there, he bathed face and neck and hands in the water it was Charlie’s duty to fetch for him each day. He tried not to smell it, as it had become malodorous with this long time in the butts; but it was blessedly cool. The nausea receded. In an attempt to reach some degree of the detachment he felt was needed now to save him, he had his usual recourse to Harvey, turning quickly through the pages until his eye was arrested at the celebrated argument from quantity, the first of its kind in the history of physiology: “The heart in one half hour makes above a thousand pulses; indeed, in certain men and at certain times, two, three or four thousand. Now if the drams be multiplied, it will be seen that in one half hour there is a greater quantity of blood, passed through the heart into the arteries, than can be found in the whole body…”

But for once Harvey failed to provide solace. It was too closely argued, too logical, it resembled too much what was happening on deck at that moment: Thurso and Yellow Henry were using the argument from quantity too, and every whit as rigorously. Perhaps he needed some more personal and passionate statement. He opened his volume of Pope and began to read at random: As Man, perhaps, the moment of his breath, Receives the lurking principle of death; The young disease, that must subdue at length, Grows with his growth, and strengthens with his strength: So, cast and mingled with his very frame The Mind’s disease, its ruling Passion came…

This was beautiful, but too measured for him in his present disturbed state, too neat in its elegant contrivance of the rhymes and precise balancing of analogies. He abandoned it in favour of Astley’s collection of travellers’ accounts of Africa: They have continual warre against Dragons, which desire their blood, because it is very cold: and therefore the Dragon, lying awaite as the Elephant passeth by, windeth his taile (being of exceeding length) about the hinderlegs of the Elephant, and so staying him, thrusteth his head into his tronke and exhausteth his breath. When the Elephant waxeth faint, he falleth downe on the serpent, being now full of blood, andwiththe poise of his body breaketh him…

He continued to read with obstinate attentiveness, through the cries that came to him as the women were branded, through the prolonged and cacophonous fanfares of Yellow Henry’s departure. Then there was an hour with only the faint washing of the waves for sound. He read of the inhabitants of Guinea, “a people of beastly living, without a God, lawe, religion, or common wealth, and so scorched and vexed with the heat of the sunne, that in many places they curse it when it riseth”. He read of the Queen of Saba who went to Jerusalem to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and of Prester John and the peoples of the interior of Africa, the satyrs who resemble men only in shape, the Troglodytes who dwell in caves and live on the flesh of serpents, and the Blemines, a people without heads, who have their eyes and mouth in their breast … At the change of watch Charlie came knocking at his door with a request from the captain for his presence up on deck.

He went up to a spectacular sunset with great rafts of fire smouldering among the dark ash of the cloud. Thurso was on the quarterdeck already, standing at the forward rail, with Barton and Simmonds behind him. The crew were mustering below on the afterdeck.

Paris mounted by the companion ladder and took up a position some yards from the first mate. The slaves were sitting in the waist, the men chained, the woman and the girl free.

As soon as the men were assembled, Thurso began speaking directly down to them in his hoarse, barely inflected voice. They had taken their first slaves on board. Any man who had sailed on a slaver would know that now the real business had begun. They had all been on a holiday before. Now they would start to earn their wages. Negroes were valuable merchandise. Every care had to be taken to make sure that each slave purchased was delivered in first-rate condition, so as to fetch best prices at Kingston market. They were to be kept under constant watch while on deck to prevent them from jumping overboard or doing themselves some other mischief. Any man found sleeping on watch could be sure of a dozen lashes for the first offence, doubled for the second.

“I will not have the negroes damaged,” he said.

Rage at the notion whitened his knuckles as he gripped the rail before him. “By God,” he said, “the man will be damaged who tries it, I promise you. He will wish he had never been born.

Use of the short whip against ‘em is permitted to all members of crew for purposes of making ‘em move and keeping ‘em in order. But I will not have ‘em cut or struck about the eyes or mouth.”

Relaxing his attention somewhat, Paris looked to seaward, where that first fiery splendour of the sunset was softening now to drifts of dusky, luminous gold.

The sky to the east, empty of cloud, was a single bright bruise of violet and rose, draining on the horizon, above the darkening line of forest, to the colder blue of night. The plunge and crash of the surf still sounded without abatement. The spray showed a dim radiance of watered blood before it rose and was lost in twilight.

“One more thing,” Thurso said. “On no account will there be fornication with the women. I will have no foulness of that sort aboard my ship. Any man found lying with a female slave will be first flogged and then stapled down to the deck. And I will know of it, never fear, because I am purposing to bring a linguister aboard tomorrow who will understand the language of these people. We will be trading ashore in the longboat in these next days. What you do ashore is your own business. I will not have my cargo damaged, I tell you, and I will not have my ship turned into a sink of iniquity. A girl still intact is worth a good ten guineas more in Jamaica. Which man of you will step forward now and put ten guineas into my hand?”’

There was silence from the men below. Thurso raised his face to the darkening sky. “I made my promises long ago,” he said. “Before most of you men were born. That is why I am still here talking to you. I will keep a clean ship while I live.”

The departure of Adams and subsequent collapse of the rehearsals brought happier days for Erasmus. He became an accepted visitor at the Wolpert home. His handsome, glowering silences, the evident force of his attachment, had ended by disposing Sarah’s mother towards him, had even in some degree, if not softened the father’s heart, at any rate relaxed his severity. Wolpert did not like the young man any better for being in love with his daughter— rather the contrary. Strong-willed and proprietorial himself, he found these qualities difficult to stomach in another; and the saving irony which he was sometimes able to direct at himself was a quality his prospective son-in-law showed not a glimpse of. Moreover, with that perceptiveness he had for all concerning his daughter, Wolpert noted still the oppressive effect on her of the young man’s visits, the way he seemed to overshadow the girl, to work a reduction of brightness in her. Nevertheless, dimmed or not, she sought to be with him, she went running to meet him. It was clear to Wolpert that his daughter wanted Erasmus Kemp and he could no more refuse her this than anything else she had ever wanted that had been in his power to grant.

So without any official change in his position or status Erasmus was allowed to visit, to walk with Sarah and talk to her, alone sometimes for short periods, more often with someone in discreet attendance— generally an unmarried second cousin of Sarah’s mother, a Miss Purdy, who lived in the house.

His nature expanded with this sense of occupying a privileged position. He talked much and confidently about the future, their future, when they were married, and that of the city, which he saw as intimately connected.

“Transport and the carriage trade,” he would pronounce, with glowing eyes. They were words of love and promise, containing all that he meant to work for, all that he would offer her. “That is where the future lies. Money is flooding into Liverpool, more every day. The best use that money can be put to is extending the docks, cutting new canals, improving the roads so as to give better access to us from the interior of the country.”

The fervour sprang from a source not altogether pure: on his father’s instructions he had been buying up a good deal of the land bordering the approach roads to Liverpool; the value of this would increase dramatically with the sort of development he was hoping for. But his enthusiasm was due only partly to this. The idealism of his nature was roused by thoughts of material progress. He saw a beautiful and prosperous city rising. Liverpool would be the greatest port in the land, greater than London. She would take over the Atlantic trade. All the manufacturing wealth of Lancashire would flow through her. Wolpert, he knew, had interests in coal and in the Cheshire salt mines. Taken with the Kemp shipping and import business, it made a formidable combination.

The future he thus envisaged was a palace of marble and Sarah was queen of it, enclosed within, securely his own. About the present he could never feel this confidence. The present was curiously porous, it had no containment, things leaked away from him in all directions. Sarah’s affections were offered too widely: they extended beyond her family, to friends, servants, even her pets—there was no end to it. In the presence of others, among people who had knowledge of her out of his reach, he was never at ease. He took greater pains than ever with his person and his clothes and was agreed among Sarah’s acquaintance to be well favoured enough but disobliging and too proud.

One habit of hers, first noticed during the rehearsals for The Enchanted Isle, troubled him greatly and he was resolved to eradicate it as soon as he had acquired the authority of a husband. She had a luminous way of recounting, or confiding—he knew not what to call it—a way of commanding attention when talking in a group, by spacing out her words rather deliberately and punctuating them with small climaxes. She would say, “That was a great disappointment to everyone,” or “I simply adore strawberries,” and she would raise her face and smile slightly and just for a second her eyes would close and there would pass over her a sort of slight shudder or pang, like the faintest of pleasurable spasms. Those around her, and especially the men, as it seemed to Erasmus, were held in thrall to her as they first awaited, then sympathetically shared, these climactic moments.

It was charming, no doubt, but there was something unseemly in it to Erasmus’s view. It might be permissible in an unmarried girl, and one who had been much indulged—too much, he sometimes thought these days; but it would not do for a wife, who after all is guardian of her husband’s dignity. He would have liked to speak to her immediately about it but hesitated to do so, being afraid that she would misunderstand his motives.

She was wilful and did not take kindly to correction. But he was resolved to make his views plain to her when they were married. Small resolves of this sort were mixed inextricably with his larger ambitions for the future.

Finding himself unable to control the present, as he could the future, by excluding anything unpalatable, he tried to do it by grasping for the essence of Sarah’s life before he had appeared in it. He would question her in a painstaking fashion, but his questions always failed to elicit what he sought; and any information she herself volunteered was somehow unmanageable. Her catechism dress, a pet pug, visits to Chester with her mother comhis mind could not work on these things, he could not take them over. Trying to imagine a past for her, a separate existence, a time when he was not present, this was as painful and difficult as trying to be Ferdinand to her Miranda, and in fact not much dissimilar.

What came more easily to him was a sort of appropriation; he was happiest when he could take her experience and reinterpret it for her. One morning in early August when they had arranged to go riding together, as he was waiting for her in a small room adjacent to the salon, his eye fell on a painting hanging there, set in an elaborate, scroll-gilt frame. It was a picture of a landscape with lords and ladies in fashionable dress of some former period. The men were handsome and proud, the ladies slender and exquisite.

Accompanied by servants and long-legged, elegant hounds they strolled through orchards, where fruit glowed among dark leaves and the turf beneath their feet was spangled with white flowers. Erasmus gazed for some time at the painting, struck by the sense of serene enjoyment contained in it. It was obviously old; the pigments had thickened and darkened, and the glaze showed through here and there. But there was a brightness still about the faces of these fashionable strollers; they had a charmed, invulnerable air, as if blessings were raining invisibly down through the strangely rounded, clump-shaped trees.