Sacred Hunger (35 page)

The woman remained impassive, staring before her with discoloured eyes. A small pulse beat at her temple. Her mouth hung very slightly open; the everted lips were dark lavender in colour and puffy-looking, as if swollen. If she felt curiosity as to why her captors were spending so long over her, she gave no sign of it. Her gaze showed nothing but an exhausted endurance.

“Let me see.” Owen stepped forward, felt the sides of the woman’s neck for some moments, then turned to the others with his uncertain smile. “That is nothing, take my word for it,” he said. “It is some feverish inflammation that will soon pass.”

“I am sorry,” Paris said, “but I fear Simmonds is right. They are glandular tumours, quite prominent. I cannot be mistaken, I felt them quite distinctly. The blood is already morbid in her. I know nothing of how this sickness comes but I believe it is generally fatal. It is here you feel the lumps, towards the vertebral region.”

He touched the woman’s neck again to indicate the place, then felt round the whole area of the neck and shoulders. The skin was smooth and resilient.

“Here,” he insisted, “in the hinder part of the neck. I am sorry, but we cannot take her.”

“It seems them fellers bubbled you after all, Mr Owen,” Simmonds said, and his normally rather bovine expression lightened perceptibly.

“Nekkid or not,” he added, winking broadly at Paris, to whom the mate’s jocularity at such a moment seemed insensitive to the point of sublimity.

Owen looked from Paris’s face to that of the woman.

He had nodded his head at the medical details in what seemed an attempt at dignified dispassion.

But at Simmonds’s remark his eyes widened and he swallowed convulsively. “God rot me,” he said. “How can a man make a living here? These people…” He gestured at the impassive tribesmen, who stood waiting in positions of loose attention, their long spears resting on the ground. “You can’t trust anyone. Everything you try and do… You buy a slave in good faith, perhaps you overlook something, we can’t always… It is true I had been drinking a little when they came in; I have had a bad bout of fever and I needed the rum to get me through. I am not through it yet, as a matter of fact. I am quite alone here, you know. There is no one…”

His mood, which had veered towards self-pity with these last words, and the sense of his solitude, grew suddenly inflamed again as he glanced at the diseased slave. His lower lip had begun to tremble. With a violent gesture, startling to those around, he took off his hat and cast it with all his force on the ground before him. He took a stride towards the woman, advancing his face furiously at her. “God damn your eyes,” he shouted, “I am not going to feed you, do you hear? Do you think I am running a charity?”’

The woman was astounded. A strained and staring quality of alertness had appeared on her face.

Some low and broken sounds came from her that might have been words of entreaty. She shrank from the inexplicable fury on the white face near her own, glanced quickly to either side of her as if seeking a path for flight, then wildly up at the blank and colourless sky above the barracoon.

‘Do you hear me?”’ Owen seized her arm and tugged at her as if in an infuriated attempt to compel her straying attention. “Not another mouthful,” he shouted. “You can get out.”

Enfeebled by illness and emotion, he could not drag her back and forth as he seemed to intend. With an effort he swung her round and pushed her violently forward so that she took some staggering steps towards the edge of the trees. Liberated thus, she stopped and stood still for some moments, as if incredulous. She raised her head to look again at the sky. There was blood round her ankles with the chafing of the fetters. It came to Paris, with a sensation of surprise, that she was beautiful.

He saw her swallow at hope or fear. Then she moved forward again lightly and rapidly, without a glance behind, and disappeared into the darkness of the forest.

There was a short silence. Then Owen appeared to notice his hat. He retrieved it and restored it to his head with an attempt at a flourish. “I think you will agree I handled that with proper firmness,” he said. His hands were trembling and after some moments he thrust them into the pockets of his jacket. “You think it is funny when a man is cheated, Mr Simmonds?”’ he said. “Well, I must spoil your joke—those Susu people would not have known her condition when they sold her to me.”

Whatever his private opinion, Simmonds had the grace to assent to this, and the examination was resumed, though Paris found his mind still on the diseased girl and the lightsome way she had stepped into the dark refuge of the forest. He found nothing amiss with the remaining slaves and left the bargaining to Simmonds. This passed reasonably quickly as it was a question merely of agreeing on the purchase price in bars—Owen would come out to the ship within a day or two to haggle with the redoubtable Thurso and make his choice of the goods.

When this was concluded and the slaves back in the barracoon, the three men returned to the house.

They took their rum on the verandah. Owen pressed them eagerly to stay the night but Simmonds was for returning downriver. He made it a matter of duty that the slaves should be conveyed that night but in fact he was not properly easy in his present company and the place was lonely. His shipmates were at Tucker’s, there would be drink in plenty there, and women.

Owen turned to Paris. Would he not stay? He could get off early in the morning, there would be time enough.

“The life is monotonous here,” the factor said. “I do not see much company of my own sort.”

Paris was not sure that he cared to be included in this category, but the pathos of the understatement half won him and the mild and desperate eyes did the rest. And so it was decided: Simmonds would convey the slaves that evening under guard provided by Owen, Paris would remain until next morning.

The mate began preparing to leave at once, desire for more drink routed by the fear of being caught on the river in the dark with a boatload of slaves.

Fettered by the legs in pairs, their arms bound tightly behind them, the negroes were thrust into the waist of Owen’s longboat. With a heavily armed Simmonds at the stern and the two Susu spearmen forming a guard, they cast off. Owen and Paris watched the boat out of sight then mounted again to the house. The woman who had been hanging out washing was now in the lean-to beside the house, sitting on a low stool, thighs spread, winding cotton thread round a wooden spool. She looked intensely black in the shade there, so black that her skin glinted blue like coal, reminding Paris of the Kru people who had ferried his first slaves. She watched the approach of the two men without expression. Her face was broad and flat-boned, with a low forehead and a wide, sullen mouth.

‘This one friend me, he sleep here one night,”

Owen said. “Two person chicken rice, you sabee?”’ He indicated Paris and himself with rapid gestures then made motions of eating. “I don’t trust the bitch,” he said moodily to Paris.

‘Here, come in here.”

The house was built on a single storey with rooms leading off a narrow verandah. Owen led the way into what was evidently his living-room. Rush mats covered an earth floor. There was a European-style couch in worn red plush and some upright chairs round a bamboo table. “Have a seat,” Owen said. “She’ll bring in the rum, she knows my habits by this time.”

He had barely finished speaking when the woman came in with glasses and bottle and set them down on the low table. She was tall and full-bodied. The cotton shift was strained across her hips and fell above the knees, showing thick, shapely legs with a faint down of black hair. Having set down bottle and glasses, she looked at Owen briefly and insolently, uttered some soft and high-pitched words and swayed out.

“She is getting above herself,” Owen said, with a wry smile that seemed to be intended as an apology. “I shall get rid of her one of these days.

She has brought her family in and I am expected to maintain “em all, father, mother, maternal grandmother, two sisters and a man she claims is her cousin. I have reason to think she plays the whore with the men who come here in the way of trade. And moreover I suspect it is her relatives that broke into the storehouse and made away with goods. But I intend calling in the Mandingo priest to get to the bottom of that business. These are difficult times, Mr Paris. On every hand there is news coming in of things miscarrying one way or another. There is Captain Potter’s being cut off by slaves at Mano and the ship driven ashore and the captain, the second mate and the doctor all killed in the most barbarous manner—the slaves were all taken by the natives again and sold to other vessels, so they in no way mended their condition by their enterprise. And along the river here things are rendered difficult lately: it is dangerous to pass and repass because Captain En-gelduc, upon his coming up the river, has refused the king his custom, or dashee as we call it, which has bred a great palaver between the king and all the whites trading along the river. Come, Mr Paris, you are not drinking, sir.”

“I am well enough,” Paris said. ‘allyou need not wait on me—I will see to my own glass.”

He watched the factor pour himself out a liberal measure. The light was fading now, shadows lengthened over the rough walls. In the silence Paris thought he heard a faint, continuous pattering sound like distant drums comor perhaps it was the sea, audible even here.

This was Owen’s evening then, the rum, the fading light, the smell of hot palm oil, the view across the baked clay of the compound to where the land dipped towards the river… “This is my first voyage,” he said. “I am new to the trade and I do not perfectly know how it is conducted. I saw that you agreed on a price in bars with Simmonds, and that is the same as they do with slaves that are brought to the ship.”

“I trade at the same prices as they do who take slaves to the ship. That is only fair, as I keep them penned here at my expense, convenient for the ships” boats. There are two rates of bars, one up country and one aboard ship. The ship’s bar is worth twenty per cent more. At present prices a male slave in good condition can be purchased up country, by those that will bring them down— travelling traders like the Vai people and these Susu that are here now—for twenty country bars, which when brought down here we buy for thirty-five or forty. The same slave, sold on board ship or here from the barracoon, will fetch sixty-five ship’s bars, which is equal to above eighty country bars. So I get eighty for laying out forty and the difference is made up in trade goods.”

The dark was gaining now and Owen rose to light the oil lamp on the table. His hands trembled no longer, Paris noted comthe rum had steadied him. The lamp had been badly trimmed and it cast a wavering light over the walls of the room and the coarse matting on the floor. Owen’s brows and eyes were left in shadow as he sat back in his chair.

‘It is in determining the value of a bar that you find yourself exercised,” the factor said. “A man has to keep himself abreast of things. The value of a bar can go up or down, Mr Paris, depending on the supply of slaves. A man can incur losses.

I have seen men ruined on this coast, decent men, traders like myself, ruined, sir, for failing to remember that the price of a slave can fluctuate.”

Owen leaned forward and the lamplight fell on his face. His eyes were unsteady and Paris saw him frown slightly in what seemed an effort to focus them. “For instance, a country bar,” he said in slow recital, “may be worth fifty flints today and sixty-five two days from now. A piece of blue baft is worth ten bars as I speak to you now.

Tomorrow, who knows? A man’s intellects are exhausted keeping up with it.”

“All the same,” Paris said, “if I understand you aright, you are making substantial profits.”

“Aye, sir, I would be, but for the exorbitant behaviour of the people here, that carry it all away. Your profits are brought down by the expenses of the kings and your own people, which are very unreasonable and great. For example in Sherbro there are three kings who divide the country among them, as well as others of less note. Every one of these expects custom from a white trader, which comes to twenty bars at your first visit, and after perhaps ten or twelve, if you bring a shallop or a longboat. I tell you, I am standing still. I have no more stock now than I did twelve month since.”

Owen paused to refill his glass. His movements were slower now and more deliberate. When he spoke again it was in a different tone, more consciously sociable.

“You are lately from England, I take it,” he said. “I envy you. How you must look forward to returning there.”

“No, I do not. To be frank with you, I think I would be content not to set foot in England again as long as I live.”

His voice, deep and rather vibrant at any time, had betrayed an intensity of feeling surprising even to himself. The question, Owen’s assumption, natural as it was, had caught him off guard.

But the factor was too rhetorical with rum by now, and too much occupied with his own deprivations, to notice much of this. “You surprise me, sir,” he merely said. “When I consider what it is to live in England, the happiness of conversation, the pleasures of a life free from all inconveniences which must certainly happen in this wilderness, where the inhabitants are scarcely above beasts, ignorant of all arts and sciences, without the comfort of religion, destitute of all wholesome laws…”

“Comfort of religion?”’ Despite himself, Paris’s tone had quickened. He had drunk considerably less than the factor, but what he had drunk had inclined him to acerbity rather than indulgence, and the phrase Owen had used was hateful to him. “Do you think we have wholesome laws in England?”’ he said.

“I have heard my fellow-Englishmen described in precisely the words you are using, and by those that were busy penning them up. Our good captain uses terms not much different to describe his crew.”

Owen seemed about to reply, but then his expression changed suddenly. ‘Here she is,” he said. “She has come at last with our supper. You have taken your time, haven’t you?”’

The woman had entered silently. Her moving form in the lamplight sent shadows flexing about the room.