Sacred Hunger (58 page)

However, he had scarcely finished dressing when Hudson came to announce a visitor, a Captain John Philips, who had called without appointment.

“A sea-captain?”’

“Yes, sir. A merchant captain, by the look of him.”

“There is none of that name on our books. Does he say what he wants?”’

“No, sir. When I asked him to state his business, he spoke short to me, as if he thought I should be hauling on the ropes. All he will say is that he has something of interest to impart to you.”

Erasmus sighed. “I don’t doubt it,” he said. “But whose interest, his or mine? That is the question, Hudson.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, you had better show him into the study.”

Making his way there some minutes later, Erasmus found himself facing a thickset, weathered-looking man of middle years, in nankeen trousers and a buff-coloured top coat.

“I am Erasmus Kemp,” he said, advancing to shake his visitor’s hand. “You have some business with me, I believe. I am rather pressed this morning…”

“Not business, sir, not exactly business,” the captain said. He hesitated for some moments, as if not sure how to proceed, though his gaze remained firmly on Erasmus. “I knew your father,” he said. “By repute, I mean, not personal. I am a Liverpool man, sir.”

“Indeed?”’ Erasmus had stiffened involuntarily at this reference to his father. But the captain’s blue eyes under their thick, fair brows wore a frank and friendly expression.

“Aye, sir, and I knew Captain Thurso.

On rather closer terms—too close for comfort. I sailed under Thurso once, before I got my own ship. Once was enough—more than enough.”

“Sir, excuse me, my time is short this morning. May I ask where this is leading?”’

“The Liverpool Merchant, that was her name, his last ship. There was a deal of talk at the time. There is always talk about a ship that goes down. And this was a new-built ship. I remembered it, being your father’s ship and skippered by Thurso.”

“Well, you are right enough, that was her name.”

“She had a figurehead on her of a big-breasted woman with flowing hair. That is right, is it not, just to be sure?”’

“Why, yes.” Into his mind there came the memory of that distant afternoon in Oates’s workshop by the Mersey, the staring figures, the smells of pitch and varnish, the irascible carver limping among his creations, his father’s enthusiasm for the huge, garish duchess looming above them with her yellow hair and blue dress, her look of a captive giant.

He had shared that day, in that sorcerer’s den, something of the feeling for the ship that had possessed his father. He had his love for Sarah then, to open his heart to wonder … “What do you mean,” he said on a note of anger, Histo come here and talk to me of a ship that was lost twelve years ago with all aboard her?”’

“She was not lost.”

Erasmus raised a hand quickly to his temple, a habit since childhood when he was distracted or confused. “Not lost?”’ It came to him now that his visitor might be dangerous. There was a heavy glass paperweight on the desk before him, the only thing that could serve as a weapon in this room. He moved his right arm a little nearer to it.

But there was nothing of madness in the tanned, bluff-featured face of the man opposite him.

If the captain had noticed the movement he gave no sign of it. “I saw her less than six months since,” he said. ‘What is left of her.

I am here fitting out a ship and took occasion to find you out and tell you of it. She is beached up on the south-east coast of Florida.”

Erasmus stared at him. “Beached? You mean wrecked on the shore?”’

“No, I mean hauled up deliberate. She was a good way from the shore.” Some of the diffidence or uncertainty had returned to the captain’s voice: it was as if he too had been visited by disbelief.

“Further than a man would ever expect to see a ship,” he said, in a lower tone.

“Florida?”’ Erasmus raised a hand to his face again. “What should the ship be doing there, so far to westward? She never reached Jamaica. What rigmarole is this?”’

“I am speaking of what I have seen with these eyes.” There was an angry brusqueness in the captain’s voice now. “I thought it my duty to come,” he said. ‘I will not take any more of your time, sir.”

“No, no.” Erasmus raised his hand.

“Pardon me,” he said. “I intended no offence. I must hear the rest of what you have to say.

Your words came as a shock to me… My father died in that same year the ship failed to return, and the circumstances of my life were altogether changed.”

“I know it.” Philips was gruff still, but mollified. “I was sorry to hear of it.”

Erasmus smiled at him. “Will you not sit?”’ he said. “I have some good Madeira here in my cabinet. Or if that is not to your taste, my man can fetch you something else.”

“What you keep close at hand is good enough for me,” the captain said, returning the smile.

Pouring out the wine, Erasmus found his hands slightly unsteady. “Now, sir,” he said.

“You have my full attention.”

Thus encouraged, and more at ease now, coat unbuttoned and glass in hand, the captain began his story. He had been in the Africa trade, it seemed, but not for slaves, except incidentally. His main trade now was in timber and hides between the North American colonists and the Spanish islands of the Caribbean. He had been following his usual route northward through the Florida Straits, bound for Norfolk, Virginia. They had anchored at a latitude of some twenty-seven degrees, south of a point on the coast known as the Boca Nueva, where there were fresh springs. He had sent a party ashore for water and firewood, and to shoot whatever game they came upon.

“No man is perfect, sir,” the captain said, shaking his head, “and seamen less so perhaps than others, being confined together for long periods. They contrived to draw offsome rum from the ship’s stores and carry it to shore with them. It was not enough to take their legs away, but it was enough to make them wild and heedless. They sighted a party of Indians and gave chase, hoping to catch the women among them. At least, that is how I understood the matter—they tried to pretend otherwise later, to lighten their punishment. There are Indian bands along that coast, sir, so much is true. They are hostile to white men and their arrows can give a death-wound if they strike in the right place. What these men did was folly, to rate it no worse. They were led on further than they intended, especially the two foremost, and found themselves in a swampy wooded ground where the only way forward was by following the course of a dry creek bed. This took them round in a blind curve and so they came upon her quite sudden, they said, tilted over in the bed of the creek, one side of her jammed against the bank, with creepers trailing over her and her decks half rotted away and both her masts down. That is how they told it to the mate and that is how the mate told it to me.” The captain shook his head again. “Out of sight of the shore, she was,” he said, “in the middle of swamps and trees, sir, where no ship has any business to be. She was an uncanny sight even for me, who was prepared for it by their account. Her name was there, on the scroll below the quarter figure. Faded, but you could still make it out.”

He had gone himself, led by the men who had found her.

He had clambered over the sloping, gaping planks of her deck and found his way below, to the captain’s cabin. “Nothing much there but rubbish,” he said.

“She had been well picked over. By those who left her there, I suppose, and by the rats that were aboard with them and maybe the Indians after. But I found this behind a rotted bulkhead.” He put a hand into the pocket of his coat and drew out a square-shaped book bound in black buckram, shredded and ragged now. “Twas in a wood box,” he said. ‘The damp has done for most of it, but some pages can still be read. It is the ship’s log.”

Erasmus reached out his hand for it with the sense of slow, protracted motion sometimes felt in dreams. His thoughts too had slowed; there was nothing in his mind but the strangeness of what the captain had told him. “But is it sure?”’ he said, with some instinct of gaining time. “Can you be sure it is the same ship?”’

“She is a snow, sir, a two-master, Liverpool made. And there is the name on her, and the figurehead.”

“But how could she have got up so far, away from the water?”’ He felt again the need to compose himself, the need for time. He was aware of the captain’s eyes resting steadily on him. “Perhaps you will tell me she crawled,” he said.

“The land keeps low on that piece of coast, it does not rise more than a few feet, and it is soft, sir, sand and shingle and mud. The Atlantic tides come in very strong. But perhaps you know those parts?”’

“No, not at all”

“The sea makes roads into the land and they run deep sometimes, I have known of four-and five-fathom depth. Behind the shore it is a maze of mud flats and streams and lagoons and they are changing all the time, silting up into swamp, changing their courses, running into creeks that go for miles. That coast never looks the same from one year to the next, and I know it better than most. Your father’s ship lies in a channel that is narrowed now and half choked up, but it could have held deep water twelve years ago, deep enough to tow a ship, taking her at full tide and hauling from the banks.”

“But the men who did that, who laboured to do it, must have been desperate to hide her from sight of the sea.”

“Aye, that is what it looks like. And they succeeded in it—she would not have been found now, but for the accident of the men getting drunk. A hundred ships could water there without knowing anything of her. Men go to shoot pig in the scrub or fowl at the edges of the lagoons, but no one goes into the swamps behind. Why should they?”’

“And the captain?”’ Erasmus spoke with a strange constraint. It was as if he wanted the other to supply him with judgement. “Surely he could not …”

“Thurso was not a man to abandon his own ship, not willingly. But this is speculation—I was concerned only to tell you what I could vouch for.” He set down his glass and rose to his feet. “I saw the vessel with my own eyes,” he said. He moved towards the door, then stopped and looked back at Erasmus, who had also risen now. “It is all I know for definite,” he said. “But I sail in those waters regular, now that Florida has been given to us by the Spaniards, and I have heard stories. I did not pay much heed to them before..

.”

“What stories?”’

“The Indians who trade with Cuba from the Florida Keys tell of a kind of settlement somewhere back behind the coast, where white and black live together and no one is chief ‘But twelve years,” Erasmus said. “How could men remain hidden there?”’

“It is feasible,” Philips said after a moment of reflection. “The southern part of Florida is a wilderness. It is trackless and empty of human kind, save for some scattered Indians. The Spanish never went down so far, not that I know of.

There was no reason why they should. For seven of these last twelve years they have been fighting a war to keep the colonies that really matter to them. A remote part of the Florida peninsula was of interest to no one. Yes, it is feasible.”

Erasmus was silent and the captain, perhaps taking the silence for disbelief—he was a prideful man and sensitive in his own way—held out his hand rather abruptly. “I did not say I believed the stories,” he said. ‘With Indians you do not know if they are speaking of today or yesterday or a hundred years ago. Well, I have done what I came to do. Now I must take my leave of you.”

“One moment.” Erasmus appeared to rouse himself from some private musing. “I am extremely obliged to you for this intelligence you have brought me. Be good enough to let me know where you are lodging, so I may send you a mark of my gratitude.”

“So much is not necessary.”

“I do not imply that it is necessary.” Erasmus practised his smile again. He had formed no conscious intention other than to send a sum of money.

It was right that a man should be rewarded for his trouble, and there was not a sufficient sum in the house. But he knew even now that the money was merely a pretext: he had to know where Philips could be found. “I would esteem it a favour,” he said.

Pressed thus, the captain complied. He was staying at the Bull in Southwark. He took his leave and Erasmus found himself alone again with the tattered black book on the desk before him. The interview had made him late: there was no time now for more than a cursory look. Philips had been right, the log was largely indecipherable. Mould had attacked the covers and outer pages, obliterating the names of captain and ship. Everywhere damp had spread the ink, running the lines together into blurred webs. The quality of the hand did not help: it was crabbed and uneven, the writing of a man not at ease with a pen.

But occasionally, and particularly in the latter part, there were entries that could still be made out, dates, details of weather and navigation. His eye caught a name: Haines, set in irons for some offence not named..

.

He had no time now for more. When he left the house the log went with him, but it was not until late in the afternoon that he was able to look at it again. All through the day’s business he had found himself recalling, half incredulously, fragments of his interview with the captain, dwelling on details of his visitor’s words and manner as if to detect some falsity in them that would discredit his story, dispel this monstrous notion that men had deliberately abandoned his father’s ship.

He was alone now in his office. In the larger room adjoining, the clerks still laboured at their long counter, heads studiously lowered—he could see the line of heads and backs if he chose to, through the spyhole set in his door. The offices were at the rear of the building, looking towards the quiet courts south of Still Paul’s. The din of the streets was muted here. The evening had darkened early and he had lit the lamp on his desk. Behind him a fire burned in the grate with a faint, persistent whispering.

He took the logbook from his drawer and began to look through it again. He saw an entry for November 1752, again with a name—it was names he paused at:

… bartered with a frenchman for 4. anchs of brandy. Bought 13 cwt rice of Tucker’s people.
They brought a man slave aboard, but it being late … promised to bring him off betimes in the morning …