Sacred Hunger (31 page)

We have to bring it on the roads we have got. What do you think will be the consequence to our salt works if we let the coal pile up thirty miles away while we wait for this Utopia of yours?”’

“I am not talking about Utopias.”

Erasmus’s eyes had kindled. ‘I am talking about known facts. The road between Liverpool and Prescot was metalled and tolls charged for the upkeep and that led to vastly improved supplies of coal from the southwest. Now they have extended it to Still Helens and in time they -“

“It is time my son is talking about.”

For some moments the heated Erasmus could not quite determine where this gentle female voice had come from.

It seemed to fall on his ears from some unlocalized source somewhere up towards the ceiling. Then, with intense surprise, he realized that it was Sarah’s mother who had spoken: in her mob cap and lace shawl Mrs Wolpert had leaned forward and actually interrupted him.

“That road was turnpiked more than twenty-five years ago,” she continued placidly. “That is before you were born, Erasmus. I remember it well, it happened in the year I was married. It has taken all these years just to carry the road on to Still Helens, in spite of all the great advantages you speak of. I hope you don’t mean to say that my husband has to sit twenty years and wait for better roads while they make their laws against him in London?”’

Erasmus could find no immediate response to this. He had felt his jaw slacken with astonishment. Never in his whole life had he heard a woman intrude her opinion into a conversation on business matters between men. It was inconceivable that his own mother should ever do so.

Wolpert must permit it, he thought, divided between wonder and contempt. Perhaps he even consulted her— her tone had betokened intimacy with her husband’s affairs. No wonder Sarah was so ready with opinion, with this model before her eyes. “No, madam,” he said at last, staring straight before him, “I did not mean to suggest that. How your husband fetches his coal to Liverpool is entirely his own affair.”

The reproof rankled long afterwards as a setback, a blow to his selfesteem, made worse by the vindicated complacency that he had seen come to Charles’s face. But when he was alone and safe from such pettifogging objections, when he was at home or riding to and from the Wolpert house or occupied with family business, his mind expanded with a sense of the glorious opportunities the future afforded and the certainty of his place in it-his and Sarah’s.

Coal was the key, so far Wolpert was right. The population of the town was more than twenty thousand now and rising rapidly, and the domestic demand for coal was rising with it. In Cheshire the boiling of brine and refining of rock salt called for coal in ever larger quantities, as did the other new industries springing up on every hand, metal-working, glass-making, sugar-refining: all were hungry for coal—and all were obliged to use the port of Liverpool to ship their goods.

It was clear to Erasmus that wagon trains could never bring the quantities needed, even if the roads were improved. The coal would have to come by water.

Already the Mersey was navigable by small ships as far as Manchester, and the barges were plying back and forth from Stockport. This had been achieved in the teeth of scoffing unbelievers, by deepening and straightening the river channels. A great feat of engineering comthey had reconstructed the river, no less. The skills thus learned could be—must inevitably be, and soon applied to man-made waterways, which would carry a vastly greater tonnage at a fraction of the cost. Erasmus felt energy course through him at the thought. His imagination might remain untouched by Ferdinand weeping for the king his father’s wreck, or Sarah clinging to a cherished notion of childhood; but it became incandescent at thoughts of transporting a hundred thousand tons of coal a year in your own barges. The future lay in coalfields and canals. He knew it beyond any shadow of question. The men who gained control of these would be the new princes of the city, eminent, powerful, rich beyond the dreams of avarice…

He was happy during these summer weeks. It was to be, in his recollection, a golden time, instinct with a promise and hope that he sensed at many different moments of his day, at home in his room or in the streets of the city or at work, where in addition to the duties normally falling to him—he was responsible now for all the coastal shipping business of the firm and for the movement of raw cotton to Warrington and Manchester—he was applying himself diligently to the study of accountancy and mercantile law.

The season seemed to contain the same promise.

It was full tide of green now in the hedges and wasteground on the outskirts of the city, where herons flapped above the marshes and cows grazed and vagrants slept in the long grass among the brick kilns. The willowherb came and the berries began to redden on the rowan trees. The meadows were scythed, the grass lying in long, slightly darker swathes. The slopes of the hills and the edges of the wheat fields echoed to the stuttering song of the yellowhammer, with its mournfully protracted final note. Then the birds fell silent and the stubble lay crepitant and hot, emitting odours of slightly stale sweetness. Summer reached its apogee and began insensibly to wane; and it would have no more been possible to say when this waning began than it would have been to say when William Kemp admitted despair as the companion of his days and with it the lure of death.

Hunched in his cabin over his journal, Paris contended with sultry heat and general feelings of lassitude. In a way, these discomforts helped his resolve to complete his notes for the day; they were, together with the words themselves, details in the belated evidence of love that he was always offering to Ruth. The entries, however trivial or commonplace, had become links in a chain of communion. He spared no distressing matter, feeling that this too, all that he was enduring on the ship, could somehow be offered to her in terms of love and contrition.

Our privileged position for trading has not lasted very long. We have now been anchored here ten days and woke this morning to find two ships in the offing, a Frenchman and a Bristol slaver named the Edgar, whose captain Thurso is acquainted with— a man named Macdonald.

The presence of the French ship put our good captain thoroughly out of temper at once. It seems that the French are notorious for paying high prices, and this because they can sell their negroes dearer in their own colonies than can we in ours. And so they ruin the trade for the English. Thurso clenched his fists when he spoke of it and flushed up very dark, and those strangely unprotected-looking eyes of his that I have spoke of before went glancing all over the deck as if he hoped to find a Frenchman handy whom he could seize up to the grating and exercise his wrath upon. His deepest rages are always reserved for crosses to his will and especially when this involves any loss in trading—I have often remarked on it; but it is nevertheless strange to hear a man abuse a whole nation, as he did the French for several minutes on end, for popery and cowardice and poor seamanship and I know not what, when the true cause is only that they can obtain five pounds a head more for their negroes than you canforyours.

He seems lacking in any sort of perspective beyond commercial advantage and without imagination for how others might see things.

Barton, though I think him a wickeder man, at least in the sense of conscious wickedness, has greater perception of others and even humour of a certain kind, as I saw once again in the matter of the muskets.

These, or rather the mutilations resulting from them, lived on in my mind with some special horror, I think because of the ludicrous display the men made of them. This was so much the case with me that I took the step— unusual these days, as he and I rarely have much to say to each other—of asking the captain directly if it were true that we sold defective firearms to these people. He denied it fiercely, being, I really think, incapable of admissions that might be weakening to his commercial prospects; but Barton later told me, with a good deal of chuckling and peering about, that English slavers have for many years been including inferior goods, bought at cheaper rates from the manufacturers, in their trade cargoes—not only weapons but metal goods generally and textiles too. ” They cheat us and we cheat them,” as Barton put it, ‘t is the way the world goes round.” I dare say it is, but I cannot help suspecting that it was we, rather than the Africans, who gave the globe its first spin in that direction.

In the time we have been here we have acquired seventeen more slaves, bringing our total now to twenty-four, of whom eight are females.

Several of them have inflammations from their burns and I have treated them as well as I can with dressings. There is a difference in the way they are branded, the men being marked on the breast, the women on the buttocks.

They have been kept mainly on deck so far, under an awning that has been rigged amidships.

Tapley was punished this morning for spitting on the deck. He received a dozen strokes with a rattan cane. He is the second to be caned since we came here; the other was Galley, who apparently tried to take hold of one of the women but she set up a shriek and prevented him. He escaped the heavier punishment of flogging, as it was seen he had done no harm. It is doubtful, I think, whether he meant any; he is in some dream of his own much of the time. The woman’s cry had so frightened him that he fell headlong on the deck and half knocked himself out.

Thurso had him hauled up and caned there and then, as a convenient example, with the blood still running down from a cut in his scalp. Even thus dazed he struggled violently and four men were required to tie him.

What the negroes think when they see their captors being thus treated, I have no means of knowing. The interpreter Thurso threatened the men with has not yet appeared.

I was told by Simmonds, on whose watch it occurred, that there was an eclipse of the moon in the early hours of the morning. He says that he perceived the shade enter upon the moon’s disc shortly before four o’clock and it was wholly darkened by five, soon after which he lost sight of it in the haze, it being by then very near the horizon. I was sorry not to have been present at this, as I think I have only once before seen the moon totally shaded.

Captain Thurso is not aboard at present.

He has left Barton in command with orders to keep a good watch and to buy any likely slaves that are brought out to the ship, also to spy on the Frenchman’s activities as far as possible, and has had himself rowed out to the Edgar; it seems that Macdonald is returning further eastward along the coast, and will know the situation there. Thurso did not ask his surgeon to accompany him, for which that same surgeon is grateful.

Not long after he had gone a party of men under Haines set off to shore in the yawl with water casks and a variety of cutting tools. What these last are for I do not know. There is much that is not explained to me; I do not mean kept from me—I suppose my knowledge is assumed; and it would be easy to resign myself to this, cease enquiring about this world of the present, into which I have strayed by some accident and which appears more grievous to me every day, just as I have ceased to speculate, or much to care, about what is to become of me. Perhaps that is all that would be needed: by an act of will to relinquish curiosity and so have no need to skulk away from God when he walks in the cool of the evening…

But this, as he knew, was death in life. It was in a spirit of rebellion against his own self-abnegation that he abruptly closed his journal now and made his way up on deck. The weather was oppressively heavy and hot, with a darkening skein of cloud drawing over the sky from the distant headlands to the south. The wind had abated but the waves were high over the bar across the river mouth; he saw the glitter of the spray and heard the low thunder of the breakers. This distant violence of the surf, viewed across the calm expanse of blue unbroken water, appeared to Paris like the stealthy release of some vindicative mania long nursed. A sickening fetid smell came over the water from Macdonald’s ship lying to windward of them with its full cargo of slaves.

Turning and looking down into the waist of the ship, he saw the negroes clustered under their canopy, their bodies patterned by shadows. The slight, continuous riffling of the awning made gleaming fluxions of light on the men’s chains. The women had been given a piece of calico to tie round their waists so as to cover the pudenda, and these squares of white held an intense purity in the thick light filtering down through the canvas. Johnson and Libby were standing guard, armed with pistols and whips.

Forward of him, astride on the boom, he saw Hughes working on the tackle for the stay ropes, head and shoulders outlined against the sky. On the deck below Cavana was sitting cross-legged, with various bits and pieces laid out before him.

Paris made his way forward and stood near the starboard rail. Cavana had glanced up at his approach but his eyes were back on his work now, and he showed no sign of being aware of the surgeon’s proximity. They had not spoken much together since he had treated Cavana for an inflamed condition of the eyes.

“What work is that you are doing?”’ the surgeon enquired after an interval of some moments.

“I am putting in new pins for these blocks,”

Cavana’s voice was surprisingly soft and musical. After an appreciable pause he added, ‘They have wore loose. They were not well fitted to begin with.”

This was the longest speech that Cavana had made for some considerable time; but he felt relaxed this morning, in the sultry weather, under the slowly thickening sky, with customary aggravation absent for the moment, Thurso away on his visit, Haines ashore with the boat party, Barton below somewhere busy with stores. Besides, though he would not have gone so far as to admit to a liking, he had formed a favourable judgement of Paris over the weeks, and this though the surgeon had started out with the black mark against him of being related to the owner. In this Cavana shared the general opinion of the forecastle.

It was seen that Paris spoke fairly to people and that he was no crimp for Thurso—it was remembered how he had stood out against the captain over treating Wilson’s torn back. Other things there were too.