Sacred Hunger Read online

  “The measure I am suggesting is practical enough, sir,” Paris said mildly.

  Thurso raised a blunt forefinger and tapped slowly at the side of his head. “It is in the mind,” he said. “You have got to bring ‘em to the right frame of mind. And when you have animals to deal with, it is done by fear, sir, not persuasion.”

  There had been a jibe contained in this and Thurso saw it register—the surgeon’s face had lost the look of youth but there was no concealment in it; what he felt changed the expression of his eyes and moved the corners of his mouth.

  “Persuasion gets you a gobful o” rice in the face,” Barton said with his lackey’s instinct for pressing home the attacks of his master.

  Paris smiled slightly but he had felt his heart quicken. ‘So you think the rice in the face was a victory for the method of fear, Barton, do you? I must say I find that a strange interpretation of the event.”

  “Take the negroes,” Thurso said, with unmoved face. He often behaved as if no one had spoken since his own last remark. “This mortality by which we suffer such losses is entirely owing to their brooding so much on their situation. If you want to get ‘em to market in good condition, you must change their way of thinking. I remember once, many years ago now, it was one of my first ships, we were trading in the Bight of Benin and had taken aboard a cargo of Ibo. I do not buy Ibo nowadays; they have a reputation for being unreliable and do not fetch prices anything comparable to the Windward Coast negroes, though I know of skippers that deal in nothing else as the trade is well ordered in the delta and slaves in good supply, so you can reduce waiting time on the coast, and the feeding of your negroes while you are waiting. On this occasion we had not been a week at sea when these Ibo began to fall into a fixed melancholy. They could not be brought to eat by flogging and began to die in numbers. I discovered from my linguister that they believed that by dying they would get back to their own country. So what do you think I did, sir?”’

  Thurso paused to drink some of his brandy. “Do you think I tried persuasion on ‘em?”’ he said. At this moment there was a light tapping on the cabin door, but at this climactic moment of his story, he paid no attention to it. “I’ll tell you what I did, sir. I had the slaves brought up on deck and in full view of all I cut off the heads of those who had died with a cleaver from the galley. Who the devil is that knocking? Give him a shout to come in, Barton. Yes, sir, that is what I did, and do you know why?”’

  In answer to Barton’s summons, the door had been pushed open and Sullivan stood wild-eyed and dishevelled on the threshold. He was in time to hear his captain’s concluding remarks.

  “I did it so they might clearly understand that if they were determined to return home they would have to do so without their heads. I had no more trouble with ‘em from that day forward. What are you doing here?”’

  “Beggin” your pardon, sir.” After the first glances, Sullivan kept his eyes down. He had prepared his speech and delivered it without faltering though rather too fast: ‘The captives bein” in chains, sir, they cannot move their limbs freely to the sound o’ me fiddle an’ the noise they make with the clankin’ is swampin’ me notes. There is more than thirty pairs, sir, fastened at wrist and ankle an’ all of thim jumpin’. The sound of the chains is drownin’ out me fiddlin’ intirely.”

  He paused, looked up briefly, then down again —he had remembered another point. ‘An” the numbers is increasin’ all the time,” he said.

  ‘I’ll niver be able to hear me own notes an”

  I’ll forget what it is I am supposed to be playin’.”

  Thurso turned frowning to his first mate. ‘What is this man talking about?”’ he said. “Is he drunk?”’ It was an old menacing trick of his not to address an underling directly.

  “What are you talkin” about?”’ Barton demanded. ‘How dare you come here with this riggermarool talk o” fiddlin’? Don’t you know you should have gone through one of the officers?”’

  As often happened with Sullivan, his initial fear—strong enough to have kept him hesitating long at the door—had diminished now in the warmth and justice of his own advocacy. ‘Beggin” your pardon, sir, but I was askin’ meself if the chains could be taken off.”

  ‘Taken off?”’

  “Just for the period of me playin”,”

  Sullivan said.

  Thurso’s brows had drawn together in a ferocious frown. For a few moments he said nothing. Then they saw his mouth move in a curious grimacing, stretching way, almost convulsive in appearance. He raised his face as if about to sneeze and a series of hoarse, choking sounds came from somewhere deep in his throat. After a moment or two, the others regarding him meanwhile in astonished silence—neither of them had any idea to begin with what ailed him, never having seen such symptoms in him before—he took out a capacious handkerchief and wiped his eyes.

  ‘By God, that’s rich,” he said. “I haven’t heard anything so rich for a long time. Did you hear him, Barton? This gut-scraper wants the chains taken off “em because the noise is spoiling his music”

  “He must be out of his senses,” Barton said blankly.

  Thurso turned to Paris, traces of tears still in his eyes. “Here is another fellow of the same kidney as yourself,” he said. “He doesn’t know what is the real world either.”

  Paris looked at the fiddler in silence for a moment. Then he said, without smiling, “I don’t disdain the connection, if he doesn’t.”

  Sullivan was too concerned with bearing himself properly to look the surgeon in the eye; but the grace of these words went to his heart and he never repeated them to anyone, not even Blair. Everything else he recounted later in the forecastle with considerable embellishment and dramatic licence. “I put me arguments fair an” square,” he said.

  ‘I gave me reasons. Not surprisin” they refused me—Thurso has no feelin’ for music any more than a toad. “If that is the case,” I says to them, “you might as well not have employed a fiddler at all.” An’ I turns on me heel…”

  Under the chaffing attention of his shipmates his spirits rose. He was by nature mercurial; and he felt sure of McGann’s shilling. But the words of kinship, unexpected, unsolicited, as he stood there with his head down and Thurso’s fearsome laughter still in his ears, these were to shine in his memory for ever.

  Soon after midnight the first of the land breeze began making along the river and Thurso ordered sail to be got up and all to be made ready for purchasing anchor. At two they weighed and got out to sea, the wind by this time giving a good offing. In the cover of darkness, as quietly as possible, the Liverpool Merchant began to steer a course south-eastward. But when the ship met the deep sea swell, the rhythm of her movement changed and the people in the cramped and fetid darkness of the hold, understanding that they had lost all hope of returning to their homes, set up a great cry of desolation and despair that carried over the water to the other ships in the road and the slaves in the holds of the ships heard it and answered with wild shouts and screams, so that for people lying awake in villages along the shore and for solitary fishermen up before dawn, there was a period when the night resounded with the echoes of lamentation.

  PART SIX

  32.

  It was an uneventful voyage, apart from the attempt of one negro to put an end to his life by severing the veins of his neck with his nails. While dressing the wounds Paris learned from Jimmy that the man had been falsely convicted of witchcraft and sold to pay his fine. ‘Very good way for make money,” Jimmy said. “Man got nothin”. So they sell “em.”

  They rounded the cape and came to anchor in eleven fathoms, abreast of the river and within sight of the fort.

  Their approach was saluted with three guns and Thurso returned the same number.

  In the afternoon a Company pinnace with twelve oars came out for them, rowed by looser-built, lither men, Paris noticed, than the Kru boatmen of the Grain Coast they had just left. Thurso left the ship in charge of Barton, and he and the sur
geon embarked in the pinnace for shore. The town at this distance was a low jumble of native huts set in a mesh of greenery.

  Lying to the left of it, on a rocky eminence above the river bank, rose the white fort, shimmering in the sunshine, dramatic and imposing, with its block towers and high, crenellated walls. Paris made out the Union Jack flying from the battlements, and another flag, blue and white—the colours of the Company, Thurso told him.

  With astonishing judgement and skill, the oarsmen brought them to shore through the violent paroxysms of the surf. They mounted the slope of the foreshore, past narrow fishing boats curved high at the prow, with tufted fetish-bundles tied at their heads. It was hot here, out of the breeze, and the strength of the light troubled Paris’s eyes. Screens of nets were drying on poles and the scraps offish scales caught in them glinted and flashed.

  Escorted by the Company negroes, they made their way past marshy flats where naked children ran, flies rose in swarms, geese and ducks pottered in the muddy water. There was a strench of dead crabs from the river bank and of decaying coconuts that had been half buried in the sand to rot the fibre free.

  The walls of the fort rose above them with an intensity of white almost blinding. There was to Paris a terrible strangeness in this great monumental structure amidst the squalid and provisional evidences of life around them: the cluttered, evil-smelling shore, the ramshackle town, the signs everywhere of a collaboration with the forces of nature that was tentative and temporary. The battlemented walls denied all this; they asserted the principle of permanence. There would always be profits to make, interests to defend. In the fertile interior of Africa her children, her greatest resource, would multiply endlessly and come down in endless procession to be sold below these walls, beside the sea.

  The way they were following rose more steeply in the last few hundred yards as they approached the rocky bluff on which the fort was built. Then they were in the sharp black shadows of the buttresses and Paris felt immediate relief from the assaults of heat and light. The heavy gates stood open. The soldiers on sentry duty, one at either side, straightened from their position of ease without coming fully to attention, their tunics dark red in the deep shadow.

  They were conducted to the Governor’s quarters, up flights of stone stairs with steps of alternate white and black, freshly painted. On the landing, defending the approach, two small brass cannon squatted. Crossed pikes stood on the wall behind. There was a passage and a narrow hallway, also hung with weapons; then finally the door to the Governor’s chambers.

  He was there to receive them, a handsome, pale-mouthed man with a high bridge to his nose and a languid, murmuring manner of speech. His shirt was elaborately ruffled with lace at the neck and cuffs and he wore a short silver wig with curled rolls above the ears.

  “Captain Thurso, Mr Paris,” he said, with minimum effort of the lips. “I am glad to make your acquaintance. We have not had dealings before, Captain, I believe?”’

  ‘no, sir.” Bewigged, cocked hat under his arm, in his ceremonial broadcloth, Thurso looked out of his element here, in this wainscoted room, with its several low tables and armless leather chairs.

  Paris was reminded of their first meeting, in Liverpool, with his uncle present, when Thurso had worn that same look of staring outrage, as if he had been derided. The captain was a fish that could only swim in a certain water…

  “I did trade with Mr Charles Gordon,” he said now, in his hoarse and lingering fashion. The words seemed forced from the depths by the pressure of some urgent secret, as if only a rage to confide could have steered them up through his windpipe. His confidences, when they came, were not distinguished by tact, however. ‘In these last years,” he said, “I have seen three Governors come and go, two under the old charter of the Royal Africa Company and one since the new Company took over.”

  ‘allyou are a man of much experience,” the Governor said, moving his almost bloodless lips in the semblance of a smile. “Please be seated, gentlemen. Will you take a glass of port, Captain?”’

  “Thank you, sir, I will.”

  “And you, Mr Paris?”’

  “I would be content with a little lemon water, something of that kind.”

  “You do not care for port then?”’

  “Not in this heat.” Paris’s tone was abrupt.

  Whatever the progress he had made towards humility, he was no better able than before to bear with condescension.

  “You are right, sir,” the Governor said. “You are a man of sense, I can see. The captain is well seasoned and I dare say it does him no harm, but I never touch it myself in the middle hours of the day. I have some barley water here. Will that suffice?”’

  “Thank you.”

  “Your port, Captain. Gentlemen, good health! I will not join you at present, pray forgive me. What I generally have at this time of afternoon, or just a little later, is a syllabub of cream and thin cider, sweetened with a modicum of honey. I find it answers very well. What do you think of such a dish, sir?”’

  “Think of it?”’ Paris found himself being regarded closely. For all the nonchalance of the tone, the Governor’s eyes were fixed on him with a distinct sharpness of interest. “I would think it healthsome and nourishing,” he said.

  “I am glad to hear you say that, sir. I prepare it myself, with my own hands. To teach my last imbecile of an orderly how to make it in the right proportions took me months, gentlemen, and I cannot tell you what stores of patience. And no sooner was he schooled to it than he succumbed to an ague of some sort that is going round among the troops. I find myself unable to face the prospect of beginning all over again with another, so I do it now myself.”

  The Governor paused and appeared to muse some moments, looking down his nose. “Yes,” he said softly. “I find it answers pretty well.”

  It seemed to Paris now that he could hear screams, though he could not tell from where they were coming—somewhere outside, it seemed.

  ‘Charles Gordon, whom you did business with, Captain, was my predecessor here,” he heard the Governor say in his well-bred, languid tones.

  “He died of a putrid fever. He died in the room next to this one. His predecessor died in this room where we are standing, of a burst blood vessel.

  But whether we say they died of this or that, they both died of the same thing, gentlemen.”

  “Oh, aye, what was that?”’ Thurso said with interest.

  “They died through not taking proper care of themselves.

  Diet is the key to it. Would you not agree, as a medical man, Mr Paris?”’

  “I do not know. There are other factors in a climate such as this one. Certainly, diet is important.” The screams were coming from somewhere below them. Paris glanced towards the windows. The drapes were drawn against the strong light. He thought of the flights of stairs they had mounted to come here. The rooms must lie along the ramparts of the fort, facing the afternoon sun…

  “Yes, I am sorry,” the Governor said.

  He had noticed the surgeon’s distraction. “There is a private of marines being flogged; they have chosen just this time to do it and sounds rise to us here from the courtyards in spite of-“

  “Well, you need not apologize to us, sir,”

  Paris said, rather too hastily. “Our ears will recover from the discomfort more quickly than will his back.”

  The Governor’s eyebrows had risen slightly at this impetuous speech, but when he spoke his expression had resumed its usual frigid composure. “It was I who ordered him the flogging,” he said. “He stole a snuff-box from my study and sold it for drink comx was quite clearly proved upon him. I ordered him a hundred lashes.

  The snuff-box was one I set particular store by, it had a sentimental value for me. You will understand my feelings when I tell you that it was a present from a lady.”

  Paris could not for the moment find a response to this, though it was clear one was expected—the Governor had addressed him, not Thurso, no doubt supposing the cap
tain incapable of finer feelings. It was he, the captain, however, who saved the present silence from lengthening awkwardly. Not finding much of interest in this tale of a theft and a flogging, he had been glancing into the corners of the room for some time and now said, “I believe these chambers have been refurbished since the last occasion I had the honour to be here? And I noticed as we came up that the timber and the ironwork on the gates are new.”

  ‘allyes, you are right, Captain,” the Governor said. “There have been extensive repairs. The work was begun in the days of my predecessor and has not been long completed. The Company, when it took over the fort from the Royal Africa Company, which as you know is now dissolved, finding it dilapidated and in some parts ruinous, thought fit to expend some considerable sums on its reconstruction. They were right to do so, in my view. This fort is the visible evidence of our presence here; it must be made imposing. We are judged by it, sir, not only the power and wealth of the Company but that of our whole nation. By their works shall ye know them, as the Scriptures say. Competition for trade is increasing all down the coast. We cannot rest on our laurels. The Company is very much alive to the importance of the image it presents.”

  The Governor lay back in his chair, as if the energy required for this speech had exhausted him.

  He drew out a square of cambric from his sleeve and dabbed at his temples and the corners of his lips.

  A scent of lavender expanded in the still air of the room. The screaming had stopped now, but the regular sound of the lash continued.

  “They were obliged to bring craftsmen out,” the Governor sighed after a moment. “All the oak for the interior panelling had to be imported. Imagine the difficulty we were under, in getting these wretched people to transport the stone. With their distaste for work of any kind, our labour here was worse than that confronting the pharaohs of old. Well, gentlemen, it grows time for me to busy myself with my syllabub. With your permission, I shall give you over to the care of one of our factors, Mr Saunders, who will take you down to see the slaves. After that you might like to take your ease for a while. Saunders will show you your quarters. I look forward to seeing you both again at supper.”