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Authors: Barry Unsworth

Tags: #Historical Fiction, #Slavery, #Fiction, #Literary, #Booker Prize, #18th Century

Sacred Hunger (6 page)

BOOK: Sacred Hunger
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Kemp drank and paused, as if waiting for confirmation. Thurso, however, said nothing, merely sat looking before him, the glass of spirits engulfed in his sunburned grip. Nobody knew exactly how many times Thurso had sailed the triangle. Some said more than twenty. He himself gave out no statistics, this being part of his private pact made long ago never to advertise God’s favours to him.

He had gone to sea at twelve as a cabin boy on a Bristol slaver in the early years of the century and had been given his first ship at the age of thirty-six. He was fifty-three now. He had survived every hazard of the trade: tempest, fever, slave uprisings, French privateers. Time and again he had returned to his home port with full cargoes, making good profits for his owners, his crews reduced by desertion and disease, himself steadily thicker-set and squarer-faced, his eyes seeking still to withdraw and failing.

Paris, who did not fully appreciate the odds against such survival, nevertheless found him amazing.

All his teeth still in place, by the look of him.

Limbs a bit stiff perhaps but he had risen on the introduction without the smallest appearance of effort.

Stomach doubtless in good order too. Only the windpipe seemed affected; and the eyes, which did not seem to have weathered as well as the rest…

“Well, Captain,” he said, raising his glass, “here is to our good success.”

With habitual caution Thurso glanced away from the surgeon’s pale, impertinent regard. The man was spying at him already. A landsman if ever there was one and cackhanded into the bargain comhe had noted at once Paris’s slightly awkward gait, the way he seemed to step short as at some threat to balance.

And a gentleman, too. What was such a man doing, signing for a slaveship? Who had set this in train?

Thurso felt forces ranged against him. He heard the voice of his counsellor. Talk to him. Disarm his eyes. Set him down lower. “So, Mr Paris,” he said, “you have not been to sea before, I believe?”’

“No.”

“It is a long voyage. You will have time enough to discover whether you are meant for the life or no. There is a kind of temperament which takes to it.”

“I do not go for that reason,” Paris said, and was warned by a sudden leap of interest in the other’s eyes.

‘The crew,” he continued in a different tone, “are they enlisted yet?”’

“Crew? We are still some weeks off sailing.

No one in his senses would engage a crew so far in advance, not for a Guinea ship.”

“I do not doubt your judgement,” Paris said mildly. “But is there not some danger that we shall find ourselves short-handed?”’

Something between a smile and a grimace came to Thurso’s face and he glanced aside at the merchant. “We generally take care of that the night we leave the Pool,” he said. “We shall gather some likely lads, never fear.”

“I believe you need more than the usual number of crew on a slaveship, so as to manage the negroes?”’

‘Manage them? Aye, you are right, sir. I see you have been going into the matter. Tell me then, how do you suggest we could secure the men, if we took them on so far in advance?”’

“Let me see now.” Paris affected to consider. He had heard the sarcasm, had noted the sly way Thurso smiled upon his uncle. The balance of pride and humility in him was always uncertain and never more so than in these days of his self-contempt. Whatever he privately felt he deserved, when meeting hostility his first impulse was to fatten it with feeding. “Give them an advance of pay,” he said with deliberate carelessness.

“Advance of pay, advance of pay?”’ Thurso turned with a stiff gesture towards Kemp, as if the latter must see now how ill-advised it was to have confidence in such a man. “Do you mean we should give them money without securing their persons? That would be utmost folly, Mr Paris. You would never see them or your money again. The men who sign on for the Africa trade are the lowest of seafaring men. They are scum, sir.” He paused, looking closely at Paris. He had seen or sensed some indefinable change in the quality of the other’s attention.

Predestined foes will find each other out, though signs of weakness may at first be only dimly perceived. Nothing changed in Thurso’s expression or his posture but when he continued it was with a vigilance half instinctive. “Scum,” he repeated.

“The very dregs of the trade. Some landsmen and simpletons among ‘em, looking for a change of circumstance, but they are men in hard case for the most part, men with something to run from.”

“Aye, poverty,” Paris said hastily.

“Otherwise they would choose better.” He saw Thurso bristle his brows at this and was warned again by the sharpness of interest in the small eyes.

“My nephew is going for instruction and experience,” Kemp said.

“That is a worthy aim,” Thurso said in a lighter tone. “Of course, I was speaking of the common seamen.”

“So was I. I do not doubt there are bad men among them. All the same, it is not beyond them to mend, I suppose, these sweepings of the prisons. Those who have remained unpunished may often be more wicked.” He paused in some confusion. Thurso had not mentioned prison, he now recalled. He felt the blood rise to his face. Without quite knowing why, he said in low tones, “Something in us dies so the rest can live on, but it must not be the heart.”

“The heart.” Grating and toneless, it came with the effect of a contemptuous question. Thurso craned round at Kemp as though looking for some saving intervention.

“Mr Paris has heart on the brain,” said the merchant, laughing more heartily than seemed warranted at this joke. “He was telling me only last night that he has been busy making a version from the Latin of a work on the circulation of the blood.

You’ll take another glass, won’t you? We will not all meet again till close on sailing. Let me give you a toast, gentlemen. Perdition to the king’s enemies. Success to our enterprise.”

Thurso and Paris touched glasses and drank, but it was the spirit of enmity they imbibed that afternoon, and both of them knew it.

7.

Bulstrode was apoplectic, with a thick neck and protuberant eyes and a gusty habit of breath. As Prospero, in the grip of histrionic excitement, he reddened and swelled in a way that was alarming to some members of the cast. He was winding up to it now, in his morning-gown and wizard’s hat covered with yellow stars, which everyone suspected he had set some of his pupils on to making.

Caliban was still venting his mirth at the notion of breeding a race of monsters on Miranda. As usual, Prospero could hardly wait for him to draw towards the end of this—as he viewed it comunnecessarily protracted bout of chuckling. And in fact his impatience had already been a cause of altercation between the two, the curate complaining that he was not being given time to do justice to this laughter, which was, as he pointed out, a very important element of dialogue, highly significant, though not expressed in words. “All the more so for that very reason,” he would point out to them, his fair hair standing up with electric tension all around his head.

But now Prospero swelled up and did exactly the same thing again. “Abhorred slave!” he shouted, before Parker could get far into his ho-ho’s, then went on at a spanking pace: Which any print of goodness wilt not take, Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee, Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hour One thing or other. When thou didst not, savage, Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like A thing most brutish, I endowed thy purposes With words that made them known. But thy vile race - A pause, however, was obligatory here and Parker was quick to seize on it. “No, just a minute,” he said. “Upon my soul, you did it again, Bulstrode. You do not seem able to forbear. I must be given time to carry out that laughter.” The curate’s hair had bristled delicately up.

His face was pale with vexation. “Caliban has no words, you see. They have taught him language but he has no words. That is the paradox of it.”

“Caliban is a malignant savage,”

Bulstrode said loudly. “He is beyond all reach of good. I say it in my speech. Damn me, man, it is here in my text, before my eyes.”

“No need for oaths,” the curate said. “My profession does not allow me to believe that there can be a soul which will take no print of goodness. Ergo -“

“No words, Mr Parker? Did you say no words?”’ This sharp question came from a girl called Elisabeth Jane Edwards, who was playing Ariel. She had a beautiful voice—it was her singing that Erasmus had heard the previous Sunday when he had blundered through the trees into the open and been ensnared. “He has some of the best speeches in the whole play.”

“Ah, yes.” The curate wore an air of pale triumph. “Quite so, but may I ask when those speeches are delivered? Allow me to answer. They are spoke when Caliban is intoxicated or in fear or pain, are they not? When he has to argue his case, he has no words, he is lost. He has no language for debate.”

“Caliban is no more than a buffoon,” one of the shipwrecked mariners said. People were getting rather tired of Parker.

The curate smiled with superior wisdom.

“If he were no more than that, why should Prospero rant at him so?”’

“Prospero does not rant,” Bulstrode said. “I repudiate the aspersion. I deliver that speech with -“

‘As a matter of fact,” Sarah Wolpert said, “I think I should have the speech.”

Both curate and tutor turned to regard her with expressions of surprise and displeasure almost identical.

‘Which?”’

“The one you have just uttered, beginning, “Abhorred slave”. I think Miranda should have it, not Prospero.”

“But that is my speech.” Bulstrode had an air of swollen and furious bewilderment. “It is set down so in the text.”

“It comes better from Prospero,” the curate said. “A great gust of rage is needed after my laughter, otherwise the point is lost.”

“I think Miss Wolpert ought to be allowed to state her case.”

This came out more loudly and emphatically than Erasmus had really intended. He had said almost nothing so far, remaining on the edge of the group, conning his lines, looking occasionally in private anguish across the narrow expanse of the lake to the sunlit fields beyond. The moment he dreaded was approaching, when in response to Ariel’s first song he would have to walk forward, round the lakeside, holding his head up, glancing to find the invisible source of the music. He found this a terribly difficult thing to get right. He rehearsed the words constantly in his mind: Where should this music be? F this’ air or this’ earth? It sounds no more… He knew the speech by heart, but that made no difference to the quality of his performance, which was lamentable. He had had time in these few days to learn that he was a hopeless actor. Apart from anything else, he felt idiotic, talking to thin air. The prospect of a reprieve cheered him, however brief. “She would hardly claim the speech for hers without good reason,” he said.

“Thank you, Erasmus.”

He glanced at her, suffered the usual blow at her beauty, the composed, fair-complexioned face delicately shaded by the brim of her hat. Her colour came and went with her feelings, he had noticed, but this porcelain composure never changed.

Her lashes were pale silk and they were wide now, as she fixed on Prospero a look of serious determination.

“After all,” she said, “it is about Miranda, is it not?”’

“I cannot for the life of me see what you mean.”

Bulstrode had puffed himself up in an intimidating manner. “I cannot tell what you are talking about, Miss Wolpert. The speech is about Caliban, not Miranda.”

“Miss Wolpert is not referring to the speech,” Erasmus said with a perceptiveness sharpened by his desire to acquire merit in Sarah’s eyes. “She is talking about the laughter.”

This time he was rewarded with a smile before she transferred her gaze back to confront the indignant wizard.

Her next words, however, made clear how little she really needed help. “Of course I am,” she said. “It hasn’t anything to do with Prospero, so why should he be so vexed? I mean, it isn’t Prospero that…” Sarah paused and blushed, then went on with increased energy: “It isn’t him that Caliban tried to ravish.” She looked from face to face with a sudden, surprising openness of regard.

“He was laughing about his attempt on me” she said. “Or have I not properly understood the matter?”’

There was a short silence among the rest of the company, perhaps at this notion of ravishment, perhaps at her forthright-ness, though they knew by now what she was capable of: had she not marched up to Erasmus Kemp and enlisted him on the spot? And then, she had a way of holding herself, an unusual habit of emphasis: as she drew to the climax of what she was saying, her voice would quicken, she would raise her head and lower her lashes and a delicate shudder, slight but perceptible, would pass over her like a throb of delivery or release. It was this the men waited for, as Erasmus had jealously noted. They attended on it now, Caliban, Hippolito, Alonzo, the three mariners. Only Prospero, armoured in egotism, was immune. “It is the father that should speak for the child,” he said. “She is obedient, as befits a young girl. Besides, she is too well brought up to burst into the conversation in that manner.”

“I verily believe,” Erasmus said coldly, “that if you could contrive it, Prospero’s would be the only speaking part in the play.”

Bulstrode swelled even redder. “That remark is totally unwarranted. Miranda can have the speech for all I care. She can have all the others too. The father can sit dumb while the child explains how she has contrived the shipwreck.” And with this he stalked some paces off and presented an offended back.

Set on her rights, however, Sarah was relentless.

“As for obedient,” she said in her high, clear voice, “she contests with her father to prevent him illusing Ferdinand.”

“Yes,” Erasmus said, with a sense of brilliant improvisation, “and at the beginning of Act Four she goes against his orders when she visits Ferdinand in his confinement.” He knew the play in every detail, having sat up half his nights studying it in the hope of improving his performance.

“So she does.” On Sarah’s face there was the glowing, slightly inward look of one who has just had the better of an argument. And in fact no one offered further objections; Prospero allowed himself to be cajoled; the rehearsal was resumed and not much later Erasmus found himself once again regarding Miranda’s face from close range. He had heard Prospero promising Ariel his freedom and on this cue had stepped forward, altogether too briskly, like a soldier, shoulders braced for the encounter, only to find himself at once marooned in the limpid depths of her eyes.

BOOK: Sacred Hunger
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