Sacred Hunger Page 4

  His main concern was to prevent any besmirching of his person above the riding boots; for larger thoughts there was no space in his mind. The visit lay on him now like a heavy sentence, one which there was no evading-he was serving it already as he made his way through the bemusing sunlight amidst sewage smells from the open drains, impatient snortings from his horse, the ring of clogs on the plank walks, quarrelling shouts over right of way.

  Coming out of Castle Street he heard the hoarse, glottal whoops of a water-seller and the clatter of his pails, and found his way blocked by the huge barrel mounted on its cart, the skinny horse standing listless while the man slopped out the water into waiting buckets. Edging by between cart and wall, Erasmus cursed the man and his parents and his buckets and barrel. The man grinned and waved his hat in an attempt to make the mare shy up, and one of the waiting women screeched at him, whether joke or abuse he could not tell.

  Once north of Pool Lane and on the outskirts of the town, both he and the horse felt easier. The Wolpert house was in open country, built on a wooded rise, its stone gables visible from a good distance, pinnacles of desire to Erasmus as he saw them now, sunlit, rising clear of the trees. As he followed the long curve of the carriageway he knew in some part of his being that these were the last moments of his true selfhood: he was about to reveal a need, and therefore an insufficiency. But what hurt him in this thought also spurred him on. His will was fixed on the girl. In obsessive natures the prospect of pain too becomes an incentive, just as fear of wounds inflames the warrior. In this gentle, windless May weather, with the new green along the beech avenue, songs of warblers falling with their strangely secretive trickle through the foliage, Erasmus found himself gritting his teeth with the violence of his intention.

  The ancient footman Andrew came in answer to his ring and stood peering, dishevelled as usual, wigless, his scant remaining hair standing in tufts above his bloodless ears. Erasmus asked for Charles in a voice that nerves had made sharper.

  “They’m at their reharsings,” the old man said in mumbling tones, blinking around him as if affrighted by the daylight.

  “I wish you’d learn to speak up,” Erasmus said. He had always thought it an unaccountable indulgence on old Wolpert’s part to keep such a witless fellow in service. ‘Did you say horses? Are they from home?”’ He was divided between disappointment and relief.

  “They’m at their speeches. Practisin”.

  Reharsing.” There was a touch of reproof here at Erasmus’s misprision. He pointed an arthritic finger towards a coppice of mixed oak and elm some three hundred yards off across the lawns that lay below the house. Through the trees Erasmus saw gleams of water. There was a small lake down there, he remembered.

  ‘Do you mean to say they are rehearsing a play down there? Who? Miss Sarah too?”’

  “Miss Sarah an” a young leddy from Stanton an’ Master Charles an’ Master Robert an’ a clargyman name of the Reverend Mister Parker an’ the schoolmaster from -“

  ‘Very well, you need not make a catalogue of it.” He looked in amazement towards the coppice, where the trees grew thickly together. The yellow of the new oak leaves and the pale green of the elms swooned together in the sunlight to make a delicate haze, fiery round the edges, with a fierce, pure line where foliage touched sky.

  Abode of angels. Somewhere within this pure empyrean Sarah Wolpert was rehearsing a play. “I’ll go down to them,” he said after a moment, and nothing could have marked his confusion more than this confiding his intention to a servant.

  “The clargyman is performin” as a savvidge.” Andrew’s pale mouth drew down.

  ‘There is some as don’t think it befittin”dis”

  ‘I don’t know what you are talkling about,”

  Erasmus replied briskly. He had made a sort of recovery. “See to my horse, will you?

  Or get someone to do it.”

  He began to make his way towards the coppice, a certain offendedness growing in him as he did so, a sense of having been excluded. Though so far locked within his breast, his love, he illogically felt, gave him rights.

  When he reached the trees he did not know which way to go; Andrew’s clutch at the landscape had given him no very precise idea. The lake was no longer visible. After a moment’s hesitation he decided to go straight forward. He startled a blackbird, which flew off with a low, reproachful fluting. The wood was more extensive than it had looked from the house and it had clearly been neglected of late years; the oaks had bushed out at ground level and there was a thick undergrowth of saplings and bramble and straggling clumps of rhododendron. Erasmus was obliged to make detours. He should not have come through the wood, he realized now, but skirted round it. Glancing up, he had a swift impression of scarlet—the sun was piercing through the red casing of the elm leaf buds. He could hear nothing. He had no idea in which direction the lake lay. He felt uncomfortably hot inside his satin suit. It came to him that he was—not seriously of course but for the moment indubitably, and quite absurdly—lost.

  He moved forward again. After some moments he thought he heard voices and he turned in the direction of the sound. The trees were thinning out. He caught a glimpse of water. Ahead of him and to his right a man’s voice was raised, sonorous and loud.

  Beware all fruit but what the birds have pecked, The shadows of the trees are poisonous too; A secret venom slides from every branch. My conscience doth distract me, O my son! Why do I speak of eating or repose, Before I know thy fortune?

  Erasmus had come to an involuntary halt. There was a brief pause, then another voice, which he thought he recognized as that of Charles Wolpert, said, “If you don’t mind my saying so, the second part of that speech is supposed to be delivered aside. The others are not supposed to hear it, you know. It is marked “aside” on your copy.

  The part beginning, “My conscience doth distract me”.”

  Some words followed too low for him to catch. Then the first voice came again: “But they are bound to hear it if the audience is to hear it.”

  “There are theatrical conventions, Rivers.” A different voice this, higher-pitched, slightly nasal. “What Wolpert is getting at is that you are delivering the whole speech in the same tone and at the same pace. You could make a pause by advancing to the foot of the stage and addressing the audience directly.”

  “Thank you, Parker, thank you.”

  There was very little gratitude in the tone of this.

  Erasmus stood transfixed. He would seem ridiculous, blundering out of the wood into the open, into full view. Other voices came now, lower, blending together so that he could make nothing out. These fell away to silence and a moment later, without warning, he heard a girl’s voice, plaintive and sweet, raised in song: Come unto these yellow sands And then take hands. Curtseyed when you have and kissed, The wild waves whist…

  Erasmus gave one wild glance upwards towards the scarlet blaze of the elm leaves, then one down as if to see where his feet had led him. The new curls of the bracken were red too, he noticed in this moment of vivid particularity, the folded serrations of the fronds rustred in colour. For a moment he felt on the verge of some momentous discovery. Then the voices joined together, male and female, in a ragged, barking chorus, “Hark-hark! Bow-wow!”

  It was like some savage incantation and Erasmus, as if summoned by it, moved forward through the last of the trees out into the open, where he came again to a halt, checked by the sudden enlargement, the openness of the sky, the gleaming oval of the lake and the wide view beyond it.

  The lake was reedy at the edges and rimmed with pale artificial shores of sand. A rowboat lay tethered on the far side. On the shore to his right, between the water and the trees, a structure to represent a cavern had been made with branches and canvas.

  Before this, on the sand, a group of people stood close together. One of them was Sarah. She was in a blue dress and a broad-brimmed sunhat tied below the chin. No one had seen him yet. Sarah said, in a clear, excited voice, “I’ll
read Ferdinand, if you like.” She took a pace forward, holding up her book: Where should this music be? i’ th’air or th’earth?

  It sounds no more…

  As she glanced round to catch the dying echoes, her gaze fell upon Erasmus, who was still standing motionless at the edge of the trees. “Heavens,” she said.

  “It is Erasmus Kemp. Where did you come from?”’

  “I came to see Charles.” Erasmus shouted the lie across the water. His heart was beating heavily.

  He made a gesture towards the trees.

  ‘Pat he comes, right on cue.” This from a portly, loud-voiced fellow who alone among them had made an attempt to dress for the part: he wore a red calico morning-gown and had a sort of wizard’s turban of the same colour on his head. The schoolmaster, Erasmus thought, seeking with immediate jealousy to identify all around her. The curate, Parker, was easy enough to pick out—he had retained his clerical collar.

  Sarah quitted the group and came round the lakeside towards him, over the sand, lifting the skirts of her dress. Watching her, not moving, he was briefly aware again of the setting, the water, yellow of broom on the rising ground beyond and scattered sheep grazing; and the strangeness of it came to him: the actors had become spectators, they were all watching him and Sarah. Then his vision narrowed to the young woman approaching him and he felt a pang at the beauty of her present slight disablement, the way the long dress and the soft sand impeded her.

  “Oh, Erasmus,” she exclaimed, while still some yards off. “I am so glad you thought to visit.” Excitement had dispelled constraint, she was regarding him boldly. ‘Just when we needed someone,” she said, with a smiling air of wonder, “you appeared like a spirit.”

  Erasmus cleared his throat. “Well, I am mortal,” he said, and she may have seen something in his eyes to corroborate this, for her look became cooler.

  “Jonathan Rigby fell off his horse and he has broke a leg,” she said.

  “I am sorry to hear that.” He was bewildered.

  This Jonathan Rigby was someone he knew only slightly. “I hope ‘twas not a bad break.”

  “No, it isn’t that. You see, we are doing a play called The Enchanted Island and he was our Ferdinand, but he can’t do it now. You could take his place if you liked.” She looked him in the eye for a moment and said in lower tones, “If you liked to please me, that is.”

  6.

  “So that is satisfactory to you and all agreed?

  We are allowing you five pounds per month wages and four pounds out of every one hundred and four pounds net proceeds of negroes, gold, ivory etc., and in lieu of your private adventure we admit you to be concerned with us two hundred and twenty-five pounds in the cargo. Your chief mate is to have three negroes privilege, your second mate two.

  There is to be a surgeon with the ship and he shall have three negroes privilege.”

  “Surgeon?”’ It was not Saul Thurso’s habit to inflect his voice much; years of bawling against the wind had reduced it to a single hoarse and grating level. “We are not bound to carry a doctor with us.”

  “Well, of course I know that,” Kemp said.

  “I do not send him because I am obliged to do so. I send him for reasons of humanity.”

  Thurso considered for some moments, looking out from the square cage of his brows at this flushed fellow who was to be his employer, thence across the narrow office where they were sitting to a section of the warehouse beyond, where bales of cotton rose to the ceiling. He felt the beginnings of rage, always his willing confederate. He said, “I do the examining of the blacks myself. I know what to look for, I know the tricks they get up to, I am an old Guinea hand, sir. I have never bought a bad negro.”

  “I know it. You have been recommended to me, Captain Thurso, by those whose opinion I respect. I know you are well qualified. But then, so is the man I am sending with you. He is a fully qualified medical man.” Kemp paused for a moment, then brought out, as if it were the most significant qualification of all, ‘In point of fact, he is my nephew.” The knowledge that this would not be welcome news to the captain hastened him into further speech: “He will be here any minute now. I asked him to call so as to effect a meeting between you. He starts back for Norfolk tomorrow, where he will stay until we are ready to sail.” He paused a moment, then said, with something of appeal in his voice, “I intend to leave no stone unturned, nothing that could assist the enterprise.”

  Thurso looked fixedly before him without speaking.

  If this had indeed been an appeal he showed no sign of being moved by it. A relative of the owner on board! He felt the fury gain ground on him, made worse by the necessity he was under to be civil. He clenched his fist below the level of the desk. All Thurso’s stoicism lay in enduring these dark rages that would come to him, increasingly of late, all his patience in waiting for the moment, the appointed victim, God’s signal for release.

  Long, cunning habit made him seek now to cover the traces, conceal himself in secondary matters.

  ‘Perhaps you were thinking of the branding?”’ he said. “As to that, we don’t need a doctor, what you need for that is an experienced man who knows the way to go about it.

  My first officer, James Barton, who has sailed with me before, he is used to doing that side of it. You need a light touch, especially for the women.

  Barton is an artist at it. I can swear by Barton.”

  “No, no, you misunderstand me,” Kemp said.

  “I don’t speak of this particular thing or that, it is the general well-being that I am interested to promote.”

  Thurso’s face had never been remarkable for its mobility andwiththe years it had set very hard indeed; but his impassivity seemed now to have a quality of consternation about it, as if rock had been able to realize at last what the weather had done to it.

  ‘Well-being,” he repeated in his hoarse, toneless voice. “Well-being.” It had the effect of a wondering interrogative.

  “Here he is.” Kemp spoke with quick relief. His voice, unlike the captain’s, was a direct register of his feelings, and he had not been finding this interview easy.

  The two men watched the tall figure make its way down the length of the storeroom between the stacked bales. They heard him give good-day to two aproned men loading a handcart. He stooped through the doorway, taking off his low-crowned, countryman’s hat as he did so.

  “I find you at the heart of your empire,” he said to Kemp.

  “Hardly empire, hardly empire. Allow me to present… Captain Thurso, Dr Paris.”

  Thurso had got up and the two men bowed slightly.

  “Your servant.”

  The voices overlapped, mingled briefly, one deep and vibrant, the other a bare mutter, hoarse and abrupt.

  “I have just been telling Thurso what a welcome addition you will be to the crew.”

  “An addition I can’t help but be.” Paris smiled slightly at Thurso but failed to detect any answering expression. “Whether welcome is another matter,” he added after a moment, in the same tone. He thought he saw some struggle for amiability on the other’s face, which was broad and brick-coloured, with prominent ridges of bone at the temples and wide, heavy jaws, a fortress of a face that yet failed to give shelter enough to the short-lashed blue eyes. These were full of fury, he noticed now, though whether caused by present emotion or their own inability to creep further into the fastness of the skull he could not determine.

  “You will be welcome aboard,” Thurso said at last. “All according.”

  “According to how we agree together?”’

  At this, Thurso drew his brows forward in what seemed the intention of a smile, and now the eyes did succeed in retreating for a second or two. “There is only one way to take aboard ship, Mr Paris, and I think you know whose way that is.”

  This was not very jocular but it was as near as the captain seemed likely to get, and Kemp fastened on it with some gratitude. “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “we’ll have a dram on it. I’v
e got some brandy here that I dare say you’ll find to your taste. And I suppose you would not be averse to a good Havana cigar? Brought in without benefit of the Spanish, naturally, but none the worse for that—some might say all the better. Here you are. Just try that. I give you good health! Captain Thurso is an old hand in the Africa trade, you know. He has made lord knows how many voyages. Your health again, sir!”

  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.