Sacred Hunger (46 page)

He checked himself at last and a deep gasp like a sob broke from him. “Legitimate means of livelihood? The face of truth that cannot be denied?

I wanted to look them in the face, when they came to release me in the morning. I had prepared myself.

But I could not stand upright, I was led away crouching still, with back bent like some submissive animal. And yet I came here. I knew what it is to be shackled and derided and still I came. How can that be forgiven?”’

Another groan came from him. Humiliation almost worse than that grey morning’s, the knowledge of his folly, to think that despair can exonerate, that the desire of death can remove the burden of conscience… “And it is not even true,” he said turning half blindly and moving to the window as if for some refuge in the night outside. “It was not true then and is not now.”

The moon was high and clear of cloud, astoundingly radiant, eclipsing the stars. Moonlight gleamed in a sheet of silver over the marshes and flats of mud they had crossed to come here, so cluttered and tawdry by day, all unified and resplendent now as if lying under some momentary blessing. And for a moment this transforming moonlight was confused in Paris’s mind with the sunlight of earlier, the form of the woman edged with fire against the bars. “It is not even true that I want to die,” he said, and with this ultimate confession he saw the moonlit levels run together and glimmer, as if washed in some thin solution of silver, and then blur to bright webs, as the tears, held long in check, came freely now to his eyes.

On the day following his return aboard, Paris resumed his journal, which he had neglected of late, with so many calls on his time and attention. He felt in any case disinclined for any more active occupation this afternoon: his limbs were heavy and he was experiencing a slight but persistent sense of oppression above the eyes. He would have liked to sleep, but to do so with the sense of a task unfulfilled went against the grain of his nature; self-denying generations spoke in his blood against it.

Hunched at his small table, aware intermittently of the foul smell from the ship’s bilges, he wrote on doggedly.

Delblanc was right when he said his purse would sufficiently recommend him. He came aboard this morning, with a small cabin trunk and a rather dressed-up, festive look. I suspect he is a man who likes changes and adventures, and perhaps especially those not much premeditated. Apparently he did not wait to see the effect of his portrait upon the governor. There is something reckless in Delblanc. I feel him to be a generous-hearted man, who might go astray in practice, though he would not behave ignobly. But he seems accountable to no one and free to follow the promptings of his nature. In this he is different from myself and perhaps it is why I feel drawn so towards him—the more now, in gratitude for his friendship and patience last evening. I am glad he is to be with us. We have had already some resumption of our discussion on the merits of heart and head; his arguments in defence of untrammelled liberty and the natural goodness of the heart are delivered with no less enthusiasm as he paces the deck of a slaveship. There is something touching in this fervour, something absurd loo—like all good theorists he is not much troubled by incongruities of circumstance. Might it be true that men would live together in peace and harmony if only the coercion of authority were lifted from them? When I look into the faces of my fellows, I find it hard to credit.

With Delblanc there have come aboard two new crew members, recruited at the fort, Lees and Rimmer. The former seems a decent man enough, a cooper by trade, badly scarred with smallpox.

He is a former seaman, though I understand he has been two years employed by the company here. The other man, Rimmer, has one of the most debauched and vicious faces I have seen, swollen with drink and rough living and with an ugly expression of the eyes, like a dog that would bite if it dared. He either ran from, or was abandoned by, another slaver that came earlier, and has since been living as he can here on the coast. Shortly after coming aboard he must have behaved with some insolence, or perhaps merely indifference, towards Barton, who struck him a blow with his open hand which could be heard all over the ship. I saw this incident myself. It was only a slapping blow, but Rimmer was knocked sideways. He knew better than to attempt a retaliation, but there was murder on his face. I did not see much change on Barton’s. “You do what I tell you,” I heard him say, “andyou do it prompt, or you’ll never reach Jamaica.” Of course Barton knows that he must take such a man in hand from the outset.

He is in command for these days; Thurso is gone ashore on some business of his own.

That look of the eyes is not so common among us. I saw it sometimes in prison. It belongs to men who will always be ready to do more hurt than they need. Tapley has something of it, but he is less bold than this new man; he needs the shelter and bidding of another, and his prefect, Libby, has not this wickedness in his face, but seems merely brutal and unfeeling.

It seems that I am become an expert on faces. Men like Hughes and Cavana have a savage eye, so intent in regard as to seem almost innocent, with that sort of fierce innocence which has known no chastening or softening. I saw that expression again on the faces of the Gold Coast negroes who stared at us through their bars. I do not know if the woman belonged with that group. Thurso had already looked them over and purchased them before I was stirring next morning, having apparently agreed on a price with the governor the night before. She is tall, like them, but lighter skinned, tawny rather than black, and her hair not so wiry. I am cursed with too much doubt, or compunction—I do not know what to call it. Perhaps it was only a figment of that mood of hope that came to me as I walked behind Saunders through those passages. But it was as if she waited there, in the sunlight…

Cavana came aboard mid-morning with a monkey on a rope, a bright-eyed little creature with tufted ears and a tail longer than itself, and very prettily coloured—a black crown on him and a small white face, and arms and feet pale orange colour. Cavana is very taken with it, though he does not like to appear so, at least not to me, I think out of some sort of shyness. Blair speaks to me freely since we treated Galley’s back together and he told me they had gone ashore soon after sunrise with Haines to get firewood and shoot pigeons, of which there are large flocks at present in the trees just a little back from the shore. While there they had met a party from the American grain ship in the road with us, who were on the same business. One of these had the monkey and seeing Cavana much taken with it had offered to sell it to him. Cavana had no money but he had a silver chain round his neck, his only possession. On the kind of impulse which seems common with these men when they want something that is before their eyes, he pulled this off and offered it in exchange. To my less impulsive nature this seemed extravagant, but I could tell that Blair would have done the same thing. The creature sat quite comfortably on Cavana’s shoulder, turning its muzzle to look at our faces and raising the skin on its scalp in a very comical way, as if it were constantly being surprised by the tenor of our conversation.

Thurso will not be back for some days yet. There is some mystery about his absence, as there is about our lingering here at all. Why trade for negroes through the fort, if prices are higher? Thurso is not a man to pay more than he needs, and it cannot be that he wishes to keep good relations for the future, as Barton once let fall to me that this is the captain’s last voyage. I believe he has come down to this stretch of coast with some private purpose, and that Barton is privy to it…

Paris laid down his pen. He was feeling distinctly unwell. The heaviness in his limbs had intensified and his temples throbbed painfully with any slightest movement of his eyes. He made himself a strong infusion of powdered cinchona bark and took to his bed, where within an hour he was experiencing the first assaults of a violent fever.

There followed a period for Paris undistinguished by passage of hours, marked only by alternations of sweating and shivering. In the lulls he continued to dose himself within infusions of cinchona and battled to repair his copious sweats with lemon water.

Sullivan, who had taken over from Charlie the duty of seeing to the surgeon’s wants—Thurso would not have given permission to a fore-the-mast man to do it —came that evening at the change of watch, found his charge muttering and tossing and conversing with shadows and ran to get rainwater from the butt so as to make cold compresses for the surgeon’s face and chest. This had been done to Sullivan by a woman somewhere in his scattered past and it had been a memory of love to him. It was all he knew of treating fevers, but he was assiduous in it, and was a devoted attendant to Paris all through his illness, sponging his brow, running to the galley with dried yarrow leaves from Paris’s stock so that Morgan could make him tea.

On the morning of the fourth day, Paris woke feeling weak but clear-headed. His restored senses brought sounds more typical of delirium, a hullabaloo above him of stamping feet, jangling chains, the jaunty persistence of the fiddle: the slaves were at their morning dance. He ate the breakfast provided by Sullivan: ship’s biscuit, in which the occasional weevil was still to be found, and some rock-hard cheddar. He enjoyed both items hugely. He felt sure now that he had been suffering from the same type of fever which had earlier attacked Johnson and True, a kind of swamp fever, he believed, transmitted by the miasmic airs of the coast. If it were the same he could expect further bouts—Johnson had suffered some return of it already, though True so far not.

He dressed slowly and made his way up on deck, where the slaves were still exercising, Libby and Tapley moving among them with whips and curses while McGann and Evans stood to the cannon on the deck above. The whole mid-part of the ship forward of the mainmast moved with this noisy, disorderly seething of the black bodies. They had been hosed down that morning, and the decks washed, and the contents of the ordinary buckets discharged over the sides; but there still came to Paris, as he stood on the side gangway, the sickening fetid smell he had grown to recognize. The timbers were becoming engrained with it. No scrubbing could remove it entirely—they would carry it back with them to Liverpool…

The women and girls moved like sleepwalkers about the deck, sometimes raising their arms and swaying their bodies as if listening to some music more remote than that transmitted by Sullivan’s quick elbow. The men jumped and lumbered in their shackles. Cries and groans and wavering phrases of song came from both men and women, mingling with the cracking of the whips and the heavy stamping of feet and rattling of chains, so that the notes of the fiddle were only intermittently audible.

To Paris, with that deceiving clarity that comes after fever— a clarity in which there is still a sort of languid disorder—there came the fancy that Sullivan was sawing at the negroes’ chains. At this moment, with the same sense of heightened but unreliable perception, he saw that some of the younger boys, though moving to the music in apparent dance, were playing a game of ambush and kidnap in among the moving bodies of the adults.

They were taking captives, he realized suddenly… With a lurch of feeling he recognized among the dancers the woman who had looked at him in the dungeon of the fort. Her face was lowered now, expressionless. She must have been brought aboard while he lay ill. He looked among the men but could not for the moment make out the Corymantee negroes. The woman had been given the same cotton waistcloth as the others, covering the pudenda but leaving the sides of the thighs bare. The muscles of her haunches flexed smoothly as she turned in the motions of the dance.

He removed his eyes from her to see Cavana come up from the forecastle with the monkey crouched on his shoulder and disappear in the direction of the latrines at the heads. At the same moment Thurso emerged on the starboard side of the quarterdeck with a scowling look of bad temper, Barton immediately behind him. “Glad to see you recovered,” the captain said, though nothing in his face showed pleasure. “What the devil was that?”’ he said to Barton.

“A monkey, sir.”

“Tell the fiddler to stow his noise, will you? They have had enough of his infernal scraping and so have I.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

Barton bawled across the intervening space of deck. Libby, who had been waiting for it, nudged the heedless fiddler. The music stopped and the dancing with it. The slaves were herded into their allotted space amidships by the men guarding them, who were eager now to finish and get below—it was close on eight bells.

“I won’t have that confounded animal running loose on my ship,” Thurso said. “Tell Cavana that.”

“It sticks pretty close to him from what I have seen,” Paris said, taking some steps towards the captain. “You must have returned while I was ill, sir?”’ he said.

He encountered the small, beleaguered eyes, saw in them the usual fury at being questioned. It was clear that Thurso was in the grip of some feeling stronger than the irritation caused by the sight of the monkey. “I returned to find that we have got a case of the bloody flux aboard,” he said. “I returned to find that, sir.”

“I did not know of it.” Paris had sensed some accusation in the captain’s words. “I have been confined to my cabin these last few days.”

“He is only twelve or so,” Thurso said, “so it is not as bad as it might be, but it is still a loss of forty bars. That is not the worst of it, however. We will be obliged now to leave the coast early. I could have taken a dozen more that now I cannot wait for. We must get out to sea and trust we can be blown clean of it.”

“He is dead then?”’

“Dead? He is shitting blood. He may die or he may recover, it makes no difference, he must be got off the ship.”

“Got off the ship? You mean simply set down ashore?”’ Thurso’s monstrous simplicity, as always, had taken him completely by surprise. “But he could be treated,” he said hastily. For a moment, absurdly, he was under the impression that Thurso had overlooked this possibility. “I can make up a panegoric,” he went on eagerly. ‘Tincture of opium has often been found efficacious in cases of severe diarrhoea, with a preparation of fennel that I know of; fennel is an excellent -“