Sacred Hunger (83 page)

“Nottin” happen, rest all go tagedder. You wait we in de bush, den you start runnin’.”

Nadri opened the gate and crouched a moment longer in the shelter of the stockade. His eyes met those of Paris and he smiled. Then he was up and running, with Paris and Kireku close behind.

Younger than the others by a good ten years and a natural runner, Kireku at once drew ahead. He moved with long strides, head up, the quiver swinging against his thigh. A shout came from somewhere slightly ahead of them, to the right. Kireku was almost in the shadow of the trees now. Then shots rang out in ragged unison and Paris saw Kireku pitch forward on his face. A moment later he felt a violent blow to his left leg. He staggered aside and fell heavily and lay on his back looking up to the sky, feeling nothing at first but the shock of the blow and the fall. Then pain gathered in his leg and with it a sense of the damage done to him: he knew now that the bone was broken. Raising his head a little he saw that Kireku was still lying where he had fallen, quite motionless. The trees were no more than twenty yards away. He heard shouts and scattered shots from somewhere on the other side of the compound. Edging round on to his right shoulder he made an effort to drag himself forward, but it was too soon, neither his body nor his will was braced enough for the pain and almost immediately he lost consciousness.

When he opened his eyes again, he found himself gazing up at the face of Erasmus Kemp, close above him. He was not conscious of any interval of doubt or any struggle for recognition. He regarded the face silently, noting with a strange sort of dispassion that it was clean-shaven and very pale and that the dark eyes held a singular brightness and intensity.

He felt a certain wonder at the sight, but not really surprise: in a way it seemed natural, and even inevitable, that his cousin should be here to preside over the last hours of the settlement. The older Kemp had given, though inadvertently; now the younger had come to take away. ‘Of course,” he said, “you have come to claim your father’s cargo.”

To Erasmus this reference to his father seemed the height of unrepentant insolence. Looking down, he saw the lop-sided smile he detested appear on his cousin’s face. “I have come to hang you,” he said, striving to keep all passion out of his voice. He took in the details of Paris’s appearance, the beard, the sunburn, the long hair tied behind. “I would not have known you but for that rascally Barton pointing you out,” he said with disgust. His cousin’s shirt—and this seemed to Erasmus almost more heinous than anything— reached scarcely to his navel, having been cut off all round, apparently to make patches. The garment he wore below it was little more than a loincloth. His naked, long-shanked legs were outstretched on the ground, the left one a mess of blood below the knee. Erasmus had felt a leap of alarm at first sight of this damage; but the wound after all was not serious—the leg could be dressed in Still Augustine. ‘Have no fear, you will walk to the gallows,” he said.

Paris looked beyond his cousin to the sky, which in this short while seemed to have become much brighter. The gulls still wheeled there, breasts flashing with light as they turned.

“All in one swoop, pretty nearly,”

Erasmus said, in a tone of satisfaction. He felt the need to drive his triumph home. “None of the troops got a scratch.”

Paris wanted to ask about Kireku and whether any others of the settlement had been hurt. But he saw Erasmus turn at this moment and speak to someone approaching. “Ah, so you have it ready,” Erasmus said. “It has taken you time enough.”

Two men came into Paris’s field of vision, carrying a blanket slung on poles to make a stretcher. Erasmus looked down again and his eyes had a light of fever. “Your turn now to be lifted, cousin Matthew,” he said, words not immediately comprehensible to Paris, though for a moment he felt that he was trembling on the verge of understanding. Then the soldiers began to lift him on to the stretcher, his senses swam and the bright gulls dissolved in the sky above him.

Privileged by his wound, Paris was conveyed as directly as possible to the shore and rowed out to the ship in the late afternoon. Before midnight both troops and captives had been embarked and the ship set a course northward for Still Augustine.

It was Erasmus’s hope that he might avoid the delays of a long sea journey home to England, and the risk of his cousin cheating justice even now by some obscure and private death, by having the people of the crew tried and condemned either at Still Augustine by Campbell or, if the latter felt this exceeded his competence, by the Governor of South Carolina, where the negroes were to be taken and sold. To this end it was important that at least one of the wrong-doers should be persuaded to inform upon his comrades in exchange for a pardon. Erasmus felt that he knew human nature passably well and did not anticipate any problem here. It would come better from a common seaman, one who had taken an active part; an officer of the ship might be able to claim that he had acted under duress. However, Barton had already proved willing to cooperate and Erasmus decided to interview him first so as to establish the facts.

The intention once formed, he could not wait for the morning. He had slept little for two nights now and the emotions of that day had exhausted him but he could not rest. The ship was barely under way when he had Barton shaken awake where he lay on the open deck and brought below.

There was rum and salt beef and ship’s biscuit laid out on the table. Also, close to Erasmus’s right hand, a loaded pistol. A soldier with bayonet fixed stood outside the door. Barton sat opposite at the table and a candle-lamp lay between them. The former mate wore nothing but a round cap made of rope yarn, the tattered remains of a red silk scarf and a pair of deerskin drawers, and he shivered like a dog in the warmer air of the cabin.

Erasmus poured him a glass of rum and he swallowed half of it, hissing on an indrawn breath as the warmth spread through him. He took off his cap and laid it on the table beside him. His lank, gingerish hair fell forward round his face.

“I know who you are,” Erasmus said. “You were mate on my father’s ship. You have already answered to your name today and so it would serve no purpose to deny it now. I intend to ask you some questions. If you know what is good for you, you will answer me frankly and fully.”

Barton raised his head to drink again, draining his glass. The sharp edge of his Adam’s apple pricked like a thorn against the loose skin of his throat.

“If you are honest with me now,” Erasmus said, “I will speak on your behalf when the time comes.”

Whatever calculations Barton engaged in were of short duration. ‘I knowed this would happen sooner or later,” he said. “I am a child o’ misfortun’ an’ no mistake. A man o’ sorrows, I am, and on no. in’ terms with grief. That is in the good book, sir. I was brought up for better things than what you see now. I can read an’ write, if you will believe me, my sainted mother taught me at her knee, but misfortun’ has been my lot in this life.”

“All you will deepen your acquaintance with grief very considerably, my friend,” Erasmus said, “if you thus persist in going round and round about things. What befell the ship?”

“What befell her?”’ Barton eyed the rum.

Cornered as he was, his sense of theatre did not desert him. And he was not altogether destitute, he now perceived: he possessed knowledge the other needed how strong the need could be seen from the quality of attention he was receiving, the starkness of interest on the handsome face opposite him. “There is a story in that,” he said, reaching to take some of the meat.

But he had paused too long. Erasmus struck the table with a blow that made the glasses rattle.

“God damn your eyes,” he said, “you impudent rogue, you, stop your cursed playacting or I will shoot you where you sit.”

“She didn’t go down,” Barton said in sudden haste. “She never went down, sir. We was blown off our course by a storm that comes in them parts in late summer, what they call hurricanoes, sir, but we never sank. That was a stout ship, she was a gallant ship in every line of her, I was proud to sail on her.”

“I will crop your ears yet,” Erasmus said between his teeth. “What the devil do I care for your pride? Tell me what happened.”

“By that time there wasn’t enough healthy men aboard to man her an” we was in fear the blacks would rise on us. We was blown westward here, on to the coast of south Florida. The captain was dead by then…

We was unlucky from the start. The trades fell short of us more than usual for the time o’ year an’ we had the bloody flux among the negroes before we cleared the Gulf o’ Guinea. “Tis a sea o” thunder there, sir, an’ a breeding ground o’ plague, with rain an’ fire comin’ down by turns.

Six weeks an’ we was still southwest o’ the Cape Verde Islands and they was dyin’ on us every day.

“Tis a terrible trade, them not in it will never know the hardships, to see your profits dribblin” into the sea an’ nothin’ you can do. I felt for your father an’ you, sir, my heart bled, Barton has always been faithful to his owners.”

Erasmus poured out more rum. In these close quarters he could smell the sharp reek of sweat, mingled with some fishy odour, that came from the other’s body, and he tensed his nostrils against it with involuntary repugnance. There was a glaze of the gutter about Barton that no outdoor living had been able to affect; it was there in the abjectness of the manner, which had something insolent in it too, and in the ragged, jaunty finery of the silk scarf. The voice was husky and dry, for all the rum, making its claims of constancy and fidelity, seeking to find the right note, enlist favour, strike a course that would bring him in safe from wind and wave. Erasmus set no store by the protestations, but he did not interrupt.

Barton appeared to be in the grip of his own story now, staring and eager with it.

‘We had to keep ‘em under hatches a lot o” the time, increasing the mortality considerable. I tell you, it would have broke your heart to see it. The doctor worked like a slave himself to keep the beggars in the world…”

Erasmus looked up sharply at this and found the mate’s eyes fixed on him in a sort of stealthy appraisal, disturbing in one whom he had thought so lost in his narrative. ‘What are you looking at?”’ he said. “Do you mean Paris?”’

“Aye, him. Feed ‘em with his own hand, he would.

That would be your cousin, I believe, sir, on the materlineal side?”’

“What is that to you?”’ Erasmus said violently.

He was silent for some moments. Then, more calmly, he said, “He did no more than his duty, I suppose.”

“No, sir. Well, on the materlineal side, so they say, it is not so strong.” No change had occurred in the mate’s voice but there was a certain cautious relaxation in the peering expression of his face and the spread of his elbows on the table. He had found a direction. “He only done what he was paid to do,” he said after a moment. “We all done that, every man of us. This is a excellent quality o” rum, sir.”

‘I don’t want to know your opinion of the rum.

Here, damn you, have some more. How did Thurso die?”’

“There was various wounds, but the cause o” death was stabbin’.”

‘Who struck the blow?”’

Barton narrowed his eyes as if in a sustained effort of memory. “Things was confused,” he said.

“It is long years ago now, sir, an” my remembrance is not clear.”

‘allyou had better endeavour to clear it,”

Erasmus said. “I shall want to know these things from you.”

“I dare say it will all come floodin” back to me in the course o’ time. Anyhow, it was the ship’s people that killed Thurso. They rose on him. I spoke out agin it. With Barton, duty always comes first. They would have killed me but they was stopped from it by Mr Delblanc, he was a passenger aboard, an’ by the doctor.”

‘What part did he play? Mr Paris, I mean. He was the leader, then? He led the others into this mutiny?”’

Barton paused. There was no doubt expressed on his face, only a kind of intensified alertness. “Yes, sir,” he said, “he was the leader, without the shadder of a doubt.”

“Was he the first to raise his hand against the captain?”’

“In a manner o” speakin’, he was. You see, sir, we had decided to jettison a good part o’ the cargo. That is, the captain had decided it an’ he put it to me an’ Haines an’ the carpenter, Barber, the night before. Haines was the bos’n. The second mate was dead by then of a putrid fever and so we was the only officers left, if you don’t count the -“

‘Jettison them? You mean throw them overboard?”’ Erasmus passed a hand over his brow.

“What, alive as they stood, and fettered?”’

“Only them that was sickly, sir. We knowed we could never make Kingston market with ‘em. An” if we did, we could not have sold “em, they was too far gone. The worst o” the weather was over but we was blown far westward, Jamaica was a good ten days off by the captain’s reck’nin’, even in fair conditions. The water was givin’ out, we was already on half a pint a day. We was wastin’ water on the negroes, d’you see, sir, because they was dyin’ anyway. That is not a efficient use o’ resources. Not only that, but a negro dyin’ o’ nat’ral causes was a total loss to the owners, that is to your father, sir, beggin’ your pardon, an’ to you as his son an’ hair. If they was jetsoned we could claim the insurance, an’ that stood at thirty per cent o’ the value in them days. But you had to show good an’ sufficient cause.”

Erasmus was silent for some considerable time, holding a hand over his eyes as if to shield them from the light.

‘Shortage of water would constitute sufficient cause,” he said at last. “It could be seen as a question of survival. But wait, did you not say that there had been storms of rain? The casks should have been full.”

“My,” Barton exclaimed admiringly, “you have got a head on your shoulders, sir, an” no mistake. The main cask was holed, the water leaked away unbeknown to us.”

‘allyes, I see,” Erasmus said slowly.

“The cask had suffered damage in the rough weather.” A court was likely enough to accept that, he thought, with Barton spruced up to say so and one more to support him. “I find that Captain Thurso acted lawfully and within his rights,” he said.