Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

  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.”

  “B
ut 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.

  “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 h
is 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.