Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

  There was also the fact that Paris, who might otherwise have given trouble, need not be consulted, as he was at present confined to his cabin with fever and with luck would continue so some time longer. With real luck, Thurso thought darkly, he would die of it.

  These facts in synthesis were present to the captain’s mind as he sat alone in his cabin over his brandy. His counsellor, it seemed, had not altogether deserted him, but returned and spoke to him now again —it was for the last time. The counsel was more than rational, it was virtuous. Thurso knew he had nothing much to gain—only Kemp would benefit from the insurance money. He knew he would be retiring at the end of this voyage. He had money saved, he had a three-quarter share in the gold dust purchased with Barton. The negroes could live or die, it would not much matter to him. But he had his reputation to think of. He had always, throughout his long career, done everything in his power to give satisfaction to his owners … Mindful of the need for lawful proceeding, he called Barton, Haines, Davies and Barber to his cabin, these being the only men surviving with any status on the ship.

  The results of this nocturnal conference were what Paris woke to in the early morning. He felt lightheaded and insubstantial, but free of fever.

  He sensed that the ship was listing slightly and guessed there had been some displacement in her hold. As he lay there, not fully awake yet but grateful for the calmer weather and his restored clarity, he heard a series of sounds quite inexplicable: a heavy clatter of chains on the deck somewhere above him, then running steps of several men together, a single cry, sustained and strangely exultant, brief splashing to starboard. Before he could believe he was properly awake, it came again, the clattering of chains on the deck—it sounded like fetters falling. He had heard no voices other than that single cry. Possessed by nothing stronger than curiosity at first and a sort of disbelief, like a man following clues in a dream, he got to his feet, dressed as hastily as his weakness allowed and made his way up to the deck.

  In all the years of his life remaining, Paris was to carry the impression of that emergence into light and space. It was to accompany his days, glimpsed again and again in the wake of experiences of a certain kind, increases of light, intimations of freedom, a sort of puzzlement too; he could not at first understand what was happening, he was bewildered by the placid sea and sky—a sky enormous and blank, sheltering and condoning everything.

  His first impression was of a fight in progress.

  Haines and Libby were half facing each other with something of the wrestler’s crouch in their posture.

  Thurso and Barton stood on either side like seconds in a duel. Perhaps a dozen men, armed with the same short, heavy sticks, made a semicircle around them, as if to make sure neither combatant broke free.

  But it was no fight, he saw now, there were no combatants. Two naked male slaves stood together side by side, unchained, up against the ship’s rail.

  He heard Thurso utter some words. Haines and Libby moved towards the negroes, joined now by Wilson. Three powerful men… The slaves were about to be manhandled over the side. Others had gone before them—it was what he had heard. That sound —they had taken the chains off them. Chains had a value still… All the people were absorbed in the business, no one had seen him yet. One of the negroes stood straight and impassive, but the other had given way to fear, he had brought his hands up to plead for him and thrust forward his head as if to make an obeisance before his oppressors. It was a posture beast-like, baited, derided, and Paris recognized it…

  All thought of consequences departed from him.

  “No!” he shouted. “No!” He began to move rapidly towards them across the deck.

  Obeying an obscure impulse he raised his right arm to the fullest extent, as if in witness. With all the strength of his lungs, aiming his voice at the sky, he shouted again: “No!”

  36.

  Erasmus expressed his belief that the ship was to blame some days later in the course of his final interview with the man who was to have been his father-in-law.

  In the passion of it he came near to betraying his father altogether. “It preyed on his mind,” he said, white-faced, hot-eyed, dressed impeccably in his suit of mourning velvet and his white stock. As the full extent of the financial disaster was borne in upon him, he had grown more than ever fastidious in his dress and person, washing frequently and changing his linen twice a day. He had taken also to the fashion of powdering his hair. “It was the failure of his hopes in the ship,” he said, “that led him to..

  . that led to the seizure.”

  If Wolpert noticed anything in the altered form of words or the brief hesitation he gave no sign of it. He thought it odd for the young man to attribute his father’s death to such a minor cause of worry, odd and excessive, but Erasmus’s nature went to extremes; in that he was like his father, who had just proved it again, Wolpert thought wryly, by the magnitude of his debts. Twenty shiploads of slaves would not have saved Kemp, in the pass his affairs had come to. So much was common knowledge now. “The ship is not late enough yet to be given up as lost,” he said. “It is hardly more than a year since she sailed and the trading is slow at present on the Guinea Coast. Your father would have known that.”

  He had spoken to defend the father’s reason against this judgement of the son, moved by a kind of pity for both.

  But the stiff composure of the young man’s face did not change. He seemed to brace his shoulders more, as if sensing—and rejecting—the intention of kindness in the older man’s words. “The ship left Africa six months ago,” he said coldly. “We had letters… We had a letter from the captain.”

  “Your cousin is with the ship, I understand,”

  Wolpert said. Kemp had let this fall one day, when they had been talking together in the street. “He will be hard hit by this. Kemp was his benefactor.”

  Erasmus himself had never mentioned his cousin. It seemed he would make no response now, save for a brief nod. But after a moment he said, “I believe the ship is lost and my cousin with her.”

  Wolpert sighed and put his heavy hands together on the desk before him. “We must come to the point,” he said. “None of this is your fault, but naturally it has changed things. When we talk of losses, it is seldom useful to consider where the fault lies.” He paused again, looking at the set, expressionless face before him. He had never really warmed to Erasmus Kemp, noting always something relentless and oppressive in him, even in his visible devotion to Sarah; but he had grown to respect the young man’s energy and ambition and he felt more kindly disposed to him now, when he was left with nothing but these, than perhaps ever before. “Your mother has some means of her own, I believe?”’ he said.

  “She has a small income from capital left in trust by her father.”

  “She will not remain long in the house there, I suppose?”’

  “No, sir. The house is to be sold and all in it. She proposes to go to her sister in Norfolk.”

  “She has impressed us all by her fortitude in this tragic loss.” A certain delicacy prevented Wolpert from saying more than this. It was years since he had seen Elizabeth Kemp with such spring in her step and colour in her cheeks. “I am heartily sorry to see you both brought to this,” he continued after a moment. ‘In what I am about to say now there is no blame for you. You could not have suspected the extent of your father’s losses, and particularly his unlucky investments of these last months.”

  “There were signs, if I had but heeded them.”

  He would not suffer this stranger to distribute degrees of blame. “I was taken up with my own affairs,” he said.

  Wolpert shrugged a little. ‘That is only natural,” he said. “But it is about those same affairs I am afraid we must speak now. It will be obvious to you that there cannot in the present circumstances be any contract of marriage with my daughter. There can be no question of an engagement, either official or otherwise, or any sort of an agreement or understanding which would place you in a special relation to her.
You will understand that clearly, I hope?”’

  “I had understood it already,” the young man said, and made to get up.

  “One moment.” Wolpert raised a hand. “I have not yet finished. These debts are not yours, they were incurred by the firm of Kemp, in which you had not yet become a partner. The creditors will recover what they can and that will be the end of the matter, as far as -“

  ‘no, sir, excuse me, it shall not be the end.”

  “Pray allow me to finish. I have been impressed by your abilities. I am prepared to offer you a place in the family firm at a salary to be agreed on. Thirty pounds a year was what I had in mind—I think you will agree that is not ungenerous. You would be an assistant to my son Charles, who conducts the transport side of the business. There is no need for you to answer at once, but I am sure that the briefest consideration will reveal the advantages of the offer.”

  “To a pauper such an offer must have obvious advantages,” Erasmus said with a bitter twist of the lips. He remained silent for some moments, then rose to his feet. “I have no need of time to consider,” he said, standing very straight. “I thank you for your offer but I must refuse it. Your kindness requires I should explain why. I cannot agree with what you say about the debts my father has left. My father’s debts are mine, whether I am legally responsible for them or not. I intend to clear his name and discharge the bankruptcy. All the creditors shall be repaid in full, with due interest. I cannot do this on the salary you offer, no, not if you tripled it.”

  Wolpert sat still for some moments, taken by surprise. ‘Well,” he said at last in a tone of some displeasure, getting up in his turn, “you know your own business best, I suppose.”

  In fact, he did not at all suppose it at the moment. There was nothing at all quixotic in the merchant’s outlook on life. Debts were the business of those who had contracted them. That Erasmus would persist in this he did not believe—nor even that the intention would outlast the rawness of his loss. It was the young man’s high-handedness that had nettled him, as on occasion before.

  Below this lay a certain relief: he had done his duty—and Erasmus might have made a difficult subordinate. There was little left to say between them now —there never had been much. “You have my good wishes, in any case,” Wolpert said as they shook hands.

  “My daughter expressed the wish to see you. She is waiting for you in the small parlour across the hall.”

  He found her standing against the tall window that looked over the terrace and the long slope of the grounds towards the lake. She made a movement towards him as he entered, but checked on seeing how straight and still he stood there, just inside the door.

  “Your father said I should find you here,” he said.

  He had prepared himself for this interview, rehearsed it. The need to conduct himself properly took all feeling from his voice. Three days before, in the secrecy of his room, in the house that no longer belonged to them, he had wept for Sarah until he was feverish. There were no tears left in him now.

  She waited a moment, then said, “You have refused, I take it?”’

  “Refused?”’

  “My father’s offer, you have refused it?”’

  She was standing against the light. He did not feel that he was seeing her clearly. His eyes felt strangely weak, perhaps with the constant effort of these last days to show the world a clear and defiant regard. He blinked to focus them. He saw Sarah turn her head to one side. There was some movement in the line of her shoulder as she stood in her summer dress against the light and he knew that she was crying.

  “So, that was your idea, then?”’ he said. “You set your father on to it.”

  “Do you think he is a man to be set on?”’

  The tears were in her voice. Why was she crying?

  It seemed to him that all the loss was his.

  “No,” he said, with an odd attempt to judiciousness, “I don’t think that.

  But you asked him this favour. He doesn’t refuse you anything, does he?”’ It sounded like a jibe, though he had spoken gravely. “Weighing bales and measuring the width of cart wheels for Charles Wolpert,” he said after a moment.

  “It would have been a way for us.” There was an attempt now, in spite of her distress, at the angry sarcasm she kept for quarrels. “He would not take favours,” she said. “Oh no, not Erasmus Kemp. This was not a favour, either—my father knows your worth. You did not think of me, not for one moment.”

  “A way?”’ He could not understand what she meant.

  “I would take favours,” he said, with a sudden passionate intensity. “I would take any means to restore his good name. When I asked him, when I told him my feelings and asked his permission to marry, and he consented, he said that he and I were different, that we had different characters. He said he would stop to look at something but I would keep on with it until it had grown so that it couldn’t be changed or touched. But it wasn’t true, we are the same.”

  He raised one arm in a stiff gesture of emphasis. “He let this grow until he couldn” t touch it anywhere .11 wasn’t possible for him to disentangle one thing from another. So the ship came to stand for everything.”

  “I have been mistaken,” he heard her say in low tones. “I supposed you would fight to keep me —for the hope of not losing me. I thought it would be something to keep your heart up in this terrible time, if you knew that I didn’t give you up, in spite of everything, that I would wait…” She paused, then said in a tone of wonder almost, ‘allyou have not thought of me at all.”

  “I am not the same as I was,” he said.

  ‘We cannot marry now, it is over. I have lost everything.”

  At this she came quickly towards him, placed her hands on his rigid shoulders, looked up into his face. “Not everything,” she said. “Not everything.”

  But she faltered at the set cast of his features, the bright, abstracted stare. He was not seeing her.

  “I don’t want to be thought different from him,” he said. ‘There is something else I remember him saying.” He had made no move to take her in his arms or touch her in any way, and after a moment she turned aside from him.

  Feeling the touch withdrawn, watching her move away, his loss was bitter to him. He had felt for that moment all the essence of promise in her, the warmth of her hands on him, the uncertain tenderness of her breath, the wide, undefended look of her eyes. Her words were brave but he knew she was wrong, she was deceiving herself, he had lost everything.

  He said, “He told me he should never have gone into cotton. He began in sugar, you know.”

  He was silent for some moments. He did not know what to talk about. There was nothing to say. She was part now of the debts and losses, part of the restitution he had to make—he was making a start with her. “I intend to put that right,” he said. ‘I intend to go into sugar.”

  “You will do as you please,” she said. “Nothing anyone else says will make a farthing of difference to you, I know that well, everyone knows it.” This calling of the world to witness was something she did often in argument; but her voice quivered now with the first real pain she had ever had to deal with alone. “When you first began coming, when you looked at me so, I did not find you agreeable at all, I thought you overbearing and farouche, and everybody thought it too. Then you ruined the whole play and you knew that I so much wanted to be in it, and I thought that it meant you cared more for me than you cared about pleasing me, and this was different from the other young men that talked to me. I know now that I was a fool to think it—it was pleasing yourself that you were set on.”

  He did not know how to answer her, nor why she was reviving past complaints when there was only this overwhelming present of his poverty. It was as if she was speaking in a language he was not fully familiar with. “It is a simple matter enough,” he said. “Your father has forbidden the match. I cannot go against him. I have been left without a penny. I have nothing to offer you.”

  “No, Erasmus,�
� she said, and her voice was clear and unfaltering now. “That is not the reason.”

  Once more, for the last time, he saw on her face the expression he had always found both fascinating and disturbing: the half-closed eyes, the luminous pause before the words came, that brief contortion of the mouth, like a prelude to ecstasy. But the words when they came were sad with final knowledge: “It is not because you have nothing to offer me but because you have nothing now to add me to.”

  He felt anger at this. She had belittled his sacrifice. With a brief phrase of farewell he turned away. She did not answer, but as he passed out of the room she called loudly after him in a voice that returning tears had made inarticulate —perhaps it was an attempt to call his name.

  The declarations had been made already in the course of these interviews with father and daughter; but they needed to be uttered in the shrine of his room, where loneliness and custom could bind them into the sanctity of a vow.

  As always, his possessions, things deeply familiar to him, acted on his sensibilities like objects of ritual. The fact that the house and most of its contents would soon be coming under the hammer gave force and fervour to his words, as a promise takes more poignant strength when uttered in the midst of danger and change. Kneeling at his bedside while sparrows chirped their loves in the eaves over the window, he spoke to God and his silver spurs and the pistols on the wall and his mother’s framed embroidery extolling the virtues of the meek.

  “Every penny.” It was less than a whisper.

  There were only the slight, plosive sounds of his dry and fervent lips, the click of tongue in the dry mouth. “I will restore my father’s good name. I will go into sugar.”

  BOOK TWO

  1765

  PART EIGHT

  37.

  Sir William Templeton, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary to the West India Office, was at his dressing-table, still in turban and flowered banyan. His levee had scarcely begun.