Sacred Hunger (7 page)

“Fair excellence,” he said in a voice not altogether under his command, “if as your form declares, you are divine, be pleased to instruct me how you will be worshipped…” He glanced beyond her for some desperate seconds. He knew the view well by now: across the lake, continuing parkland, then a low stone wall with a gate in it, beyond this the upward slopes of the pasture, dotted with yellow clumps of broom and hawthorn bushes in their first delicate suffusion of flower. All the dreams of escape he had ever had lay in the sunlit ground beyond that gate; escape for both of them together they could go there and climb the slope and he could say his own words to her, not these stupid words he was obliged to repeat. Since agreeing to be Ferdinand he had not succeeded in having a single moment alone with her. He met her eyes again, seemed to see disquiet in them, though of a kind unlike his own. “So bright a beauty,” he said, huskily and too quickly, “cannot sure belong to human kind.”

This had all to be done over again more than once while Ferdinand strove to keep his temper before the comments of his colleagues, and to master his tendency to race his words together. It was late in the afternoon when he set off for home. The sun was warm still, the fields bordering the road were green with young corn and the air was full of the song of larks. He felt weary with his efforts at discipline and divided in his feelings comx was the paradox of his condition during these days that he was happy to be released yet sorry to leave. What comfort there was lay all in retrospect: he combed the scenes just past for smiles, words, glances of encouragement.

These had not been lacking, but she was so confoundedly set on the play that he could not tell whether her encouragement was for Ferdinand’s suit or his own.

He had entered the town and was riding at a slow pace towards the area of small market gardens and brick kilns that lay around the entrance to Sweeting Street when he found the way blocked by spectators of a fist-fight—two men stripped to the waist and both showing marks of blood were facing up to each other, though whether they fought on a quarrel or for a purse he did not pause to enquire, but turned off down an alleyway to avoid the crowd and found himself after some minutes in a maze of close and evil-smelling lanes and courts in the vicinity of the docks.

The approach of night was already to be sensed in these narrow, airless confines. There was room for not much more than the passage of his horse. A bedraggled woman called to him from a doorway and two ragged children ran alongside, whining for coppers, plucking at his boots. He knew the river was to his left and tried to keep in that direction but it was impossible in this warren to maintain any consistent course.

He was impatient rather than afraid—Erasmus did not feel fear easily and knew how to use the sword at his side; but the dark was not far off and his calfskin boots alone were prize enough for the wretches that inhabited here to risk hanging for. He was resolving to find someone and ask directions while still some light remained when he heard a harsh sound, like a painful breath, and saw as he reined in his horse a dark heap against the wall some yards down a narrow entry.

For some moments he hesitated. He had heard of this sort of trick too. But there had been too much suffering in the sound for him simply to ride away. The harsh aspiration came again as he sat there and again as he dismounted but with the first scrape of his steps it sounded no more. He saw the heap start against the wall, with a sudden movement almost violent. Then as he drew near, it was absolutely silent and still.

Matted hair obscured the face but he saw blood on it, still glistening fresh, and as he leaned closer he made out the puncture marks of small teeth: one side of the man’s face had been bitten at by rats while he lay helpless there. But it was not this that held Erasmus, rather a kind of puzzlement: why, at the first sound of steps, had he fallen so silent and still?

Erasmus leaned closer and looked into the man’s eyes. They were wide open, staring up at him or at the night beyond him and the awaited end the night contained.

And Erasmus knew himself in that moment for an intruder, knew this creature wanted him gone, was with the last energy of his life holding himself still against being touched, being moved. That recoil against the wall had been an attempt at concealment. He had crawled into this runnel as if dying were a sin he did not want to be caught at.

The stench of long neglect rose from his rags, a nauseous reek of old cold dirt and grease and excrement and fever. Erasmus felt his gorge rise. He turned away and went back to his horse, unaware yet, as he rode on, as he found his way eventually into wider, better-lit streets of shops and taverns and people, that he too had been violated in some narrow place where he had crawled. There are no stronger fetters than those we forge for ourselves. Because he had ridden away, because he might have been mistaken, Erasmus told no one of this encounter. It was never disinfected or treated in any way. The memory festered and in the course of time rotted its container and leaked into his father’s death and into the smell of the ship’s timbers.

Work on the ship continued; she rose on her stocks from day to day, proceeding by ordained stages from notion to form. Like any work of the imagination, she had to maintain herself against disbelief, guard her purpose through metamorphoses that made her barely recognizable at times—indeed she had looked more herself in the early stages of the building, with the timbers of the keel laid in place and scarphed together to form her backbone and the stem and sternpost jointed to it. Then she had already the perfect dynamic of her shape, the perfect declaration of her purpose. But with the attachment of the vertical frames, which conform to the design of the hull and so define the shape of it, she looked a botched, dishevelled thing for a while, with the raw planks standing up loose all round her. Then slowly she was gripped into shape again, clamped together by the transverse beams running athwart her and the massive wales that girdled her fore and aft. She was riveted and fastened with oak trenails and wrought-iron bolts driven through the timbers and clenched. And so she began to look like herself again, as is the gradual way of art.

William Kemp was present at every stage.

Garrulity grew upon him. With his tricorn hat tilted back, his sober, expensive, negligently worn clothes, his short wig emphasizing the dark flush of his face, he held forth to the people of the yards, the shipwrights and their labourers, the fitters, the rope-makers—he would talk to anyone connected with the ship, down to the lad heating tar to calk her seams.

With business associates he was voluble about the opportunities just then afforded. There was no shortage of examples among their common acquaintance. Old Jonathan Horstmann who, as everyone knew, began as a tallow chandler in a back-street shop and bought a thirtieth share in one of the first slavers to sail out of Liverpool, had just died, leaving near a quarter of a million. Less than three years previously, the Wyatt family had fitted out four ships for the transport of twelve hundred negroes to the Caribbean. They had made no less than six voyages since, on the regular circuit. “I was talking to Ned Wyatt only last week,” Kemp said. ‘It brought the family return enough on those six voyages to stock another dozen vessels in the West Indies with rum and sugar.” He raised his hands to make a quick shape of wealth. “Now I ask you, where else can you get profits like that?”’

In part it was superstition; much of that talking was like the babble of a spell to keep off demons. He was not desperate, however, during these days, merely rather feverish and talkative. Those who afterwards asserted otherwise did not know him. Poverty was distant, his success had been complete. His life was miraculous to him. He had limped into Liverpool as a boy of twelve, barefoot and penniless, and picked up a sort of living along the docks until he was big enough to get work as a labourer. He had put his pennies together. With his first five pounds he had bought a share in a consignment of hayforks and scythe-blades for the colonists in Virginia. The profits from this bought sugar in Jamaica which was then resold on the Liverpool Exchange. This trebled his capital. He repeated the venture with a larger stake and went on repeating it until he was strong enough to go into cotton. Markets for English printed cottons were opening everywhere. With luck aiding energy he had grown rich beyond his dreams. Perhaps it was this, the sense of his career as miraculous, that was ultimately his undoing. Miracles are not subject to reversal. Crutches can be thrown away, the wine will not run thin again; Kemp had been raised from the pit and he could not believe he would fall back into it, any more than Lazarus into his.

He could fear it but he could not believe it. And so he could not adapt to the losses he had taken, the blockades of the war years, the plunge in prices, his heavy expenditure on attempts to find a fast red dye that could compete with Indian cottons.

The Liverpool Merchant was part of the miracle.

It fascinated and consoled him to watch the building of it from day to day, to see the gaunt-ribbed hulk wrought to a shape of beauty and purpose. He had other interests; his dealings were diverse, like those of most Liverpool merchants of the day. In Welsh quarries men toiled to bring out the dark slate for him; colliers under his charter shipped coal down from Carlisle for the Birmingham furnaces; settlers in remote places boiled their water in kettles he had exported. But the ship was something of his own.

For Erasmus too this was a time unlike any other. Changes he noticed in his father seemed to reflect his own state, symptoms of his own—and Ferdinand’s—disorder. His life during these days was lived at quite distinct levels of intensity. There was the business, in which he had as yet a relatively small part, being mainly responsible for the transport by mule train of various manufactured goods from Warrington to the Mersey docks and for buying up small lots along the route against the day, which he felt sure could not be long delayed, when the present track would be made fit for coaches. Then there was home, his mother’s complaints and his father’s certainties, fencing practice at the academy, nights on the town with friends, drinking bouts which he did not enjoy greatly, disliking the sensation of being other than himself-it was this that made him such a bad actor. Nevertheless, it was the acting, the scene of his rehearsals, where his true life lay at this time—the lakeside, the pale sand of the shore, Caliban’s cave, Prospero’s cell: these formed a territory where Erasmus endured for love’s sake what was worse than any labour, the twice-weekly parade of his ineptitude, the ache of not knowing who Miranda’s smiles were for.

Once or twice at the beginning the rehearsals had to be held indoors because of rain; but then the weather settled down to a long succession of warm, clear days, identical save for the gradual advance of spring, the deepening colours of the hawthorn blossom on the slopes above the lake, the appearance of soft spikes of flower on the chestnut trees in the grounds. Amidst this slow flushing of the season experiences took on an importance for Erasmus that somehow belonged rather to their associations than to themselves and made odd fusions in his mind. Already there, the virulent speck that would curdle his memories, already working among the impressions of the time, a man sniffing at timber, another the sport of rats in an alley, a haunting song of deep seas and dead fathers that came to him while he waited for his cue.

Sometimes he went with his father to the yards to see how work was progressing on the ship. One of these visits was towards the end of May and it stayed long in his mind because of an accident that happened then.

She was framed up by this time, with all her cross-beams in place, and the oak timbers which would support the bowsprit, and the flexible ribbands of fir nailed along the outside of the ribs so as to encompass the body lengthways and hold it in frame. On this day they were putting in the first of the long single planks that ran the length of the vessel from stem to stern. Erasmus stood beside his father on the bankside, following with his eye the curve of her hull as it bellied out away from him comshe would slide down into the water stern-first when ready.

The vertical timbers shoring up the scaffold at her sides rose sheer above. Erasmus looked up but his eyes pained him, he could see little beyond the gunports. The air was full of sunshine and smoke. Higher up the bank, but still quite close to the slipway where the ship rested in her cradle of scaffolding, three men had overturned a barge and they were burning the crusted filth of the river off her.

There was an acrid smell and smoke hung in the air, blue from the faggots, black and oily from the melted pitch of the boat’s bottom.

“They are putting in the first of the strakes,”

Kemp said. “They have marked out where the next plank is to go, you can see the line of the batten.”

Erasmus narrowed his eyes to see through the bright haze the pale line of the batten that ran a good third of the vessel’s length. Nearby, running alongside the slipway, was the long kiln for steaming the planks —the oak had to be softened until it was pliable enough to be moulded to the shape of the hull. Erasmus could hear the hiss from the copper boiler housed inside; steam rose from it, adding to the sunshot haze.

“Here’s Thurso now,” Kemp said. “He mentioned that he would come by to see how things are going forward. He has got someone with him.”

They came from beyond the ship, passing through the deep shadows under her bows and out again into sunlight, the square-built, deliberate captain whom he had met already and a lean man, rather dandified, with a sailor’s walk and his hair in a short pigtail.

As they came out from the shadows into the sunlit space between the ship’s hull and the beam-sheds, there was a sudden ruffling breeze over the water and Erasmus saw the man with Thurso raise a sharp face and sniff like a dog.

Thurso raised his short black cane to the corner of his cocked hat. “I thought I’d bring Mr Barton along with me,” he said. “I have spoke of him before, I think. He is to be my first officer.”