Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

  8.

  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.”

  “Humble servant, sir.” Barton gave father and son a look and a bow in turn, then took two deferential paces back and stood with his hands at his sides. He had restless black eyes and a thin mouth that smiled easily.

  “Well,” Thurso said, in his hoarse, uninflected voice, “she lies sweetly in the slip. She has been well framed, Mr Kemp.”

  “I am glad to hear you say it.” The merchant’s look of pleasure was testimony to this.

  “Tis true she sets well, she is broad enough in the beam.”

  “I don’t trust a ship with a narrow bottom,”

  Thurso said. ‘Eh, Mr Barton?”’

  “Right, Captain, right, hunnerd per cent.”

  “Or a wench either,” Kemp said. “All the same, between you and me, Captain Thurso, I have sometimes repented that I did not have her made bigger.

  There are Bristol ships that will hold you six hundred negroes, so I am told.”

  “Aye, but how long must they stay on the Guinea coast before they are full-slaved? Why, sir, flux or fever will do for half of ‘em before you are ready to sail. We will be home and dry while they are still rotting there. No, take my word for it, a ship the size of this one is what you need, around a hundred and twenty tons” burden. You’ll get two hundred blacks between decks on the Liverpool Merchant, clean as a whistle, and off again in three months.

  You’ll see that I am right, sir.”

  ‘A man can see a deal of things by lookin”,”

  Barton said unexpectedly, ‘pervided he knows how to use his lamps.” His voice was quick and fluent, unhesitating.

  “The strakes they are putting in now will need to be laid right,” Thurso said. “It is the planking lengthways that makes the difference to a ship.”

  “Those already laid fit snug enough. Come down nearer, Thurso, and take a look. You will scarce see the joins between them.” Face glowing, Kemp drew the captain towards the ship’s side, to where a ladder led up to the work platform high against the hull.

  A group of workmen waiting at the foot of this for the next piece from the kiln made way for them respectfully.

  Erasmus did not follow immediately but turned instead to look out towards the glimmering, slightly ruffled water of the river. On the wharf before him men were hoisting down barrels into a lighter. Out in midstream a skiff with two timber-rafts in tow was making towards the Pier Head. When he turned round again he saw that Barton had remained beside him and felt constrained to speak. “It will be a delicate business, I suppose,” he said, “fitting those heavy planks on to a curving surface.”

  He saw Barton raise his head in the same alert, dog-like way, as if sniffing for the right line to take with the owner’s son. The movement raised his throat slightly clear of the red silk choker he was wearing and exposed the upper part of a pale, puckered scar, which ran for some four inches along the side of his neck, revealing with an ugly fidelity the curve of the cut that had made it. “The hull curves two ways, sir,” he said, “beggin” your pardon, that is what makes the job ticklish-like, as you rightly say.”

  ‘How do you mean?”’

  “Well now, a ship’s hull.” Barton’s voice had a sudden energy of pleasure in it. He raised a brown hand, palm upwards, fingers slightly curled. “Think of a fourth portion of a orange what you have took the peel off it all in one piece, if you think of that portion of peel, sir, the edges will curve inwards top and bottom and at the same identical time that peel will curve along its length, fore and aft. It is the same thing with a ship’s hull. Every blessed one o” them planks has to fit snug against the next along its length and by its depth.”

  It was clear that Barton had a way with words; there had been a savouring, lingering quality in this; he was smiling still with pleasure at the comparison. ‘That is what makes it ticklish-like,” he said.

  Kemp and Thurso had turned back towards them.

  Four of the men had begun to climb to the platform, a double plank in width, slung against the battens. The men by the kiln were wrapping rags round their hands.

  “They are fetching the next pieces out,”

  Kemp said to his son. “They have been steaming long enough—near eight hours. We shall stay and see them laid in place.”

  Erasmus saw the great oak plank drawn smoking from the kiln. It must have been thirty feet long. Six men, their hands swathed in rags, went at a crouching walk with it across the dozen yards to the ship’s side. Here it was roped and hoisted from above —men had been waiting on the cross-pieces of the unfinished deck, high up in the smoky brightness, difficult to see. He watched the plank hauled to the level of the platform, saw it manhandled into position against the batten markers, saw it driven into place with heavy mallets, the blows sounding in ragged unison as the men forced the heavy timber to bend in obedience to the curving shape of the hull. Once in place it was held there against the strain of its cooling fibres with thick wooden billets that fitted flush against the plank and were bolted through and locked on the inside of the vessel.

  “By God, those two fellows are putting their backs into it,” Kemp said in tones of approval.

  It was not quite flush, Erasmus noticed: the billets amidships, where the convex curve was greatest, did not seem long enough, and had to be lashed to the bolt-heads; the two men his father had referred to were hauling at the short ropes, leaning back on their narrow platform to get a better purchase.

  Kemp took out his watch and consulted it.

  “Less than fifteen minutes to get that timber in place.”

  Thurso was beginning, in his laborious, impeded way, to say something in reply, when there was a wrenching sound from the ship’s side, followed at once by a strangely tuneful twanging note, like a single vibrant beat of pinions. Erasmus glimpsed a flying shape of white caught in the sun like a flash of wings, saw the gap where the timber had sprung free, sweeping the two men working there off the platform, one to slide down between hull and slipway and lie groaning out of sight, the other, whose fall his eye had caught, flung clear on to the wharfside, where he lay broken and still.

  The pause of shock, before the men’s mates moved towards them, was of the briefest; but to Erasmus, when he thought later about it, it had no limits, extending without dimension of time into the blank afternoon, the hazy light, that twanging note of death. He was young enough still to glance at the others’ faces for guidance in composing his own; and what he saw there had no end or beginning either. The only face on which he could detect any expression at all was Thurso’s, whose small eyes contained a look of satisfaction, as at some promise fulfilled.

  9.

  From a man maimed and a man dead and a look in another man’s eyes, his memories of the ship took a sweep over a void and only found lodgement again in the week before she was launched. There were difficulties with the figurehead, which continued almost up to the last minute, due to his father’s wish for changes and his consequent altercations with the carver, Samuel Oates.

  Oates was a notable craftsman, famed for his execution of figureheads, quarter figures and all kinds of ornamental scrollwork for the timber heads. He had been a shipwright till a fall from scaffolding had lamed him and sent him back to his boyhood passion for carving wood. With
the expansion in shipbuilding he had prospered greatly and now employed two journeymen and several apprentices.

  These days he did not take kindly to customers who pestered him over details.

  Kemp, however, was adamant. He knew the importance of emblems; and he knew what he wanted. For the rudder he wanted the bust of a man in a plumed hat and full wig, to epitomize the newly formed Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, of which he had become a member. For his figurehead he wanted the Duchess of Devonshire as the Spirit of Commerce, flanked by two small lions. He had seen the duchess once and thought her splendid. It was she now who was causing the difficulty. Either Oates had misunderstood his instructions or comz Erasmus suspected—his father had changed opinion, which he more frequently did these days. In any event the carver had fashioned her bareheaded, whereas Kemp had decided that he wanted some regal adornment, something like a diadem or coronet. “Not a crown,” he said. “It would not be seemly for her to wear a crown. But if she is to represent the enterprise that creates the nation’s wealth, she must have a coronet at the very least.”

  It was here, in Oates’s workshop, that Erasmus came nearest to a sense of wonder at what they were setting in motion, felt something of the spirit that emanated from his father, among these staring effigies in this long gallery of a room, amidst smells of paint and wood shavings, viscid brews of varnish and oil, resinous bubblings from the open jars where Oates distilled his turpentine. A naked, waxy nymph, her lower regions concealed in bright green foliage, a turbaned Turk, two gilt cherubs and a prancing unicorn looked down at them through the vaporous air. Oates stumped among his creatures, limping and irascible. “You must understand, Mr Kemp,” he said, “I have other work in hand, I cannot begin her over again and have her ready in time for you.”

  The huge, brightly coloured duchess loomed above them, her blue eyes fixed in a wide stare. She was sealed and waxed and shining, ready for all weathers.