Sacred Hunger

by Barry Unsworth

  “I say yes, sir, and trust I will give satisfaction and God bless you for an open-handed gentleman.”

  Erasmus relaxed a little. He had offered more than he needed to, which was not a habit of his when bargaining; but he had been in fear that the man would refuse.

  “It will take some two or three weeks for me to make arrangements,” he said. “During that time you will live here and you will be dressed and fed. Then you will accompany me, as my servant, to the Florida coast. While in my house you will be expected to conduct yourself properly. Do you take my meaning?”’

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No drunkenness, no rowdiness, no harassment of the maids.”

  “No, sir.”

  “You will find me worse than any Indian if you get up to those tricks.”

  It was not often that Erasmus made witticisms of this or any other kind; perhaps only relief could have produced this one. He was surprised almost to see a smile come to the other’s face. It was a smile of considerable charm, broken-toothed, guileless, totally unabashed by the reference to his offence. And in it Erasmus saw the beginning of a retribution twelve years delayed. “And you will speak to no one of this business,” he said. “No living soul.”

  39.

  There was much to see to, but not so much as he had feared. It is when we make plans for an absence that we learn the extent to which we are needed at home.

  A good deal of business had to be left in the hands of the junior partner, Andrews; but Erasmus’s secretary was entirely familiar with the workings of the firm and could be trusted to guide and advise. The old man, Fletcher, was still active and hard-headed enough; he grumbled at having more to do, but made no real objection. Someone was found to deputize at meetings of the Association. Many of the members had holdings in the West Indies, so prolonged absence from London was not uncommon.

  There was the chartering of a ship to see to and letters of introduction had to be obtained for Colonel Campbell, the recently appointed governor of Florida. None of this presented much in the way of difficulty, but it took time. While waiting, he informed himself as far as he could about this new Colony, acquired by accident almost: Spain had handed her over some two and a half years previously to buy back her jewel of Cuba, taken by the English fleet.

  It seemed that what Philips had said of her was largely true. The Spanish had never much valued the possession, except as safeguarding their trade routes from Mexico and the Caribbean. They had done little to develop the territory or even to explore it. It offered nothing, after all, to anyone’s notions of usefulness. The southern part was an uncharted, subtropical wilderness. There was no gold or silver to be found there and any Indians that were captured soon died when enslaved, a fact that greatly reduced their value. During the latter part of the recent colonial wars, the Spanish had scarcely ventured from their capital of Still Augustine in the north, penned in by the warlike Creek Indians, who had been incited and supplied with arms by the English in Georgia. It was with the main task of pacifying these Creeks and assuring them of English gratitude that Campbell had been sent there. Or such, at least, was the declared policy. Privately Erasmus was given to understand that the expressions of gratitude would be accompanied by appropriations of traditional Creek hunting grounds to offer to English settlers.

  Harvey, meanwhile, kept to his side of the bargain and behaved well. Metamorphosed into a superior servant, in a suit of good cloth and paste buckles to his shoes and his hair dressed in a pigtail, he entertained his fellow-domestics with stories of the sea and aroused the beginnings of tenderness in the cook. He could still hardly believe his luck.

  He had entered a world where anything could happen. His new master was rich, the rich had unaccountable fancies—and Harvey was glad of it.

  Erasmus found a certain kind of happiness in this period of planning. His cause was just: a wrong had been done, and the perpetrators of it might be living still, while his own father had lain underground these twelve years. He said nothing of this, however, to anyone at all. To his associates, as to his wife and father-in-law, he explained the voyage as a business venture. This was plausible enough.

  Florida was a new Colony, it was His Majesty’s declared policy to encourage settlement by assisted passages and grants of land. Many could be expected to take advantage of this, there was certain to be a demand for manufactured goods.

  “I shall form useful connections up there in Still Augustine,” Erasmus said to his father-in-law.

  ‘This new Colony is a potential market of very great importance, I believe. Those who strike while the iron is hot will get the best share of it.”

  “Do you seriously think that Florida colonists will buy their sugar from us and pay the tariffs when they have Havana just across the water?”’ Sir Hugo looked without friendliness at Erasmus from under white, dishevelled eyebrows. “You must have taken leave of your senses,” he said.

  Erasmus met the old man’s gaze with unconcealed antagonism. He had always been impatient of opposition but of late years, with all his opinions confirmed by increasing wealth comt infallible testimony —any slightest criticism drove him to anger.

  “I was not talking of sugar,” he said coldly.

  “Do you think there is naught but sugar in this world? Do you think people wear sugar on their backs or turn the earth with it? And if it is madness we are talking of, what is this indiscriminate buying of negroes but madness? I am reliably informed that your factors in Kingston are buying men with no mouth left and women with dugs to their knees, and keeping them all in compounds with nothing to do.”

  “The compensation we receive from the government will take no account of sick or whole, it will be paid on the number of heads and calculated on current prices.”

  “Compensation?”’ Erasmus affected a look of frigid puzzlement. “Whence comes this notion? Some incubus must have visited your sleep.”

  “They are going to abolish the trade. It is coming, I tell you, there is a bill preparing now.

  I have it on authority.”

  “A parcel of clerks and petty fellows that hang about the ministries and sell information by the shilling,” Erasmus said with contempt. It was hardly believable that Jarrold should give credence to such stories. He was a man whose shrewdness and ruthlessness were legendary, who had risen from lawyer’s clerk to merchant banker and amassed a fortune on the way comhe was worth half a million at least. In a lifetime of trading he had scarcely touched anything that did not turn to profit. And to be visited now with this quite unfounded but unshakeable fear of the abolitionists, which was like enough to ruin him. No, not fear, more like a need, something he was seeking. The intervention of God, perhaps … It was an unusual kind of thought for Erasmus and he was uneasy at it—uneasy and perplexed: his father-in-law’s career had after all been highly meritorious in its single-minded pursuit of wealth.

  Even now, in the shadow of this Apocalypse of his own creating, the old man was trying to realize a profit …

  “You will lose by it,” Erasmus said. “A negro is valuable only in terms of the work that can be got out of him in the period immediately after purchase. He is not a capital asset, the merchandise is too perishable. It is not like cattle, you cannot breed him for profit. This movement for abolition of the trade is a chimera, there will be no bill, there are no voices against it but some few members of the Quaker Faction and one or two meddling fools outside parliament. But it is useless to talk to you.”

  The money being thus squandered might have ultimately come down to him through his wife. He had thought at one stage of trying to have the old man declared incompetent, but apart from this particular mania he seemed rational enough. The only thing to be hoped was that he might die soon and so limit the damage.

  Erasmus’s own money at least was not in any danger. He had given instructions for his twelve per cent holding in the bank to be quietly sold in small lots while the stock was still high.

  His farewells to his wife on the day o
f departure were scant in the extreme. He was embarking that evening, the coach was waiting below with Harvey and the baggage already inside. He had to wait while Marie announced him: his wife had lately decided, or been told by one of her friends, that too much ease of access between married persons was vulgar.

  As he entered Fritz the poodle yapped at him as usual from its cushion and showed its pink gums.

  A travestied and unrecognizable woman in a peach-coloured gown, her features concealed behind a mask of greyish, pimpled skin, reclined on a sofa in the dressing-room adjacent to the bedchamber.

  “Is it you, Margaret?”’ he said, advancing.

  “What in God’s name is that on your face?”’

  “It is a chicken skin,” she replied in a voice slightly obscured. “I am advised by my friend Lady Danby that it is the non plus ultra for restoring one’s complexion.” The ragged fringe of skin round her mouth moved with the movement of her lips.

  ‘It has to be a freshly killed bird so as to be moist enough.”

  “So your husband, who is to be away several months, is to make his farewells to a chicken skin.”

  “I cannot see why you should need to look at my face just because you are going away, when you take such small interest in it while we are under the same roof. This must be kept in place for an hour at least, so Lady Danby says, if it is to do anything.”

  ‘Lady Danby is little better than a whore and I am sorry to hear you call her friend,” Erasmus said. “I cannot wait that long, we are sailing with the tide.” He took her listless hand and kissed it.

  “I hope you will take care of your health,” he said. “Your complexion, I see, is in no danger of neglect.”

  In the coach, as they jolted past Tower Bridge, it occurred to Erasmus that his wife must have donned the chicken skin shortly before his visit, though she had known he was coming. She had wanted to conceal herself. Her complaint against him had some truth in it: on the occasions, rare enough now, when they slept together, he did not look much at her face; at all other times when they met she was masked or disguised in some way, with fard and rouge and patches or with some charlatan lotion. It came to him that he almost never saw Margaret’s real face. He wondered if he would recognize her passing in the street, or in the midst of a crowd… There was one face he would know instantly, after twelve years or twenty, the green eyes, so pale as to seem like some solution of silver, the deeply marked brows, the patience and obstinacy of the expression… With a sudden rush of detestation Erasmus realized that he knew this face of Matthew Paris more intimately than that of any other person in the world.

  It was a face that returned frequently to him during the voyage, accompanied always by further remembered details of his cousin’s appearance and manner, this process resembling a story he repeated to himself, more elaborate with every repetition.

  But wherever the story began it ended always in the same place, with those stronger arms lifting him, swinging him away, violating his body and his will. He had uttered no sound, submitting in furious silence, making himself a dead weight in his cousin’s arms…

  He recalled Paris’s appearance on that last visit, the gaunt and awkward frame, the thick wrists and clumsy-seeming hands that were yet so precise in their smallest movements, the deep voice with the odd vibration in it and the sardonic, lop-sided smile. There had been that disturbing suggestion of physical power, of imperfect control …

  The possibility that this face, this bundle of attributes, should have continued in being all this while, surviving his father’s ruin, his own loss of love and home and all the long struggle to pay off his father’s debts, was something he found difficult at first to endure. That the survival had been achieved by such heinous crimes—murder, piracy, the theft not only of the negroes but of the ship itself and then only to abandon her—made it the more monstrous. The thought that his cousin might be alive still was literally monstrous to him, a shape of ugliness and deformity in the natural order of things, something to be extirpated.

  It subverted all the rules that men lived by. If such wrong-doing was allowed to succeed, what price duty, what price honour? What price his own faithful discharge of obligation to the family name?

  But as the days at sea followed one another in monotonous succession, with the wash of waves against the ship’s bows and the slow creaking of her timbers, he found himself in the strengthening grip of paradox. The less Paris seemed deserving of liberty and life, the more Erasmus found himself hoping that he was still in possession of these, so that he could be brought to justice and deprived of both together. For the other miscreants who had been aboard, whom Paris had doubtless persuaded to join him, Erasmus cared little. They were scum in any case. But his thoughts tended always to a passionate preservation of his cousin’s life, until the fear that he was not there, that he might not be able to be found, even that the whole story might still prove to be a fabrication, set him burning with a fever of anxiety as he lay sleepless on his narrow bunk, rocked tirelessly by this barren mother who could give him no security, no relief. The chafing of the sheets brought him to sexual arousal sometimes, a mechanical tension that was like a transference of his tense will. At these times he brought himself to a cold release and lay empty, waiting for dawn.

  As the leagues mounted between himself and what he had left, the years fell away, became unreal, and he returned to the elemental feelings of childhood.

  His life dwindled to one intense focus, of such simplicity and power that it reduced the rest to shadows.

  This falling away was like the slow dismantling of a scaffolding that had never been necessary; but he could not discern the structure it had supported, or seemed to support comt too was an illusion. There was the intense and brilliant focus of his resolve.

  Outside of this little was visible to him. The blankness of sky and ocean seemed evidence only of more stripping away. But in lieu of possession and identity there was the notion of justice, which deepened and grew abstract and religious, renewed every day in the promise of the dawn, confirmed by the simple sunlight, solemnized by the approach of the dark.

  Harvey he questioned from time to time and always closely, as if intent to find him out in some contradiction; but the seaman’s story was too simple for that, and at the same time too vague. Harvey had no picture in his mind of the route that had led him to the creek. He had blundered on to it. “I had taken drink, sir,” he said, always with the same expression, wry and philosophical, as befitted references to this common accident of the human condition. He could remember, so he said, the watering place and the general lie of the coast where they had anchored. And indeed he felt pretty sure of this, though apprehensive of failure; he knew his master well enough by now not to relish the thought of disappointing him.

  However, he was not a man who worried overmuch and he was otherwise enjoying the voyage mightily: it was the first time in his life that he had been at sea without having to sweat at the ropes. He messed with the steward and other crew members exempted from watch and regaled them with extraordinary stories about the world of fashion into which he had been introduced. His own simple wonder disarmed his listeners and he was popular with everyone aboard.

  The same wonder governed his relations with his employer. That a man with a fine house and servants and money—in short, everything he needed in life —should want to go halfway round the world merely to look at a stinking hulk in a creek bed was so far from reasonable, so opaque to normal understanding, that it placed Kemp on a different level of humanity altogether, lordly, superbly unaccountable, needing to be humoured like the mad.

  This humouring Harvey took seriously, conceiving it his duty, part of the terms of his engagement. His story gained in fluency and dramatic colouring without acquiring much more in the way of substance. It was also refined in the direction of virtue: someone else had drawn off the rum from the ship’s stores, someone else again had been for trying to catch the women. To the discovery itself he could add little. The ele
ments after all were few: the drink, the headlong chase, the stumbling through the mangrove swamp, the curving bank of the channel and the tilted wreck lying there amid the debris of her masts, the vegetation trailing over her from the banks on either side. Sometimes he added details. ‘She was a slaveship,” he said once. “I been on slavers. There was the remains of the bulkheads markin” off the rooms.”

  At the same time he tried to defend himself against possible mistake. ‘That bit of coast,” he said, “it never looks the same. Sometimes it an’t even the coast you are seein”. You see what looks like land but it is only shapes of mist built up on the horizon and they disappears as you come closer in.”

  As they passed through the Santaren Channel and out into the Florida Stream, these words came to seem prophetic. They struck a season of wandering and irregular mists, warm air above the current meeting with colder on the edges. Through these they loitered for some days with the low green shapes of the Keys, glimpsed intermittently on the port side, vivid and brief enough to seem like hallucinations.

  Anxious to avoid the shoals to eastwards, the captain kept in mid-channel until they were north of the Great Bahama Bank, then approached the Florida coast at the rough latitude of the Boca Nueva—the only landmark Philips had supplied and so far invisible in the continuing mists.

  He did not dare go in too close. The only charts they had were Spanish, well drawn enough but not to be relied on, the configuration of the coast in this south-eastern part having undergone constant change as the sea nibbled at it. ‘It is like a flobby old prick hangin” down, gettin’ wore away all the time,” Harvey remarked in a moment of gloom to the steward, after studying the map of the peninsula. ‘With poxy Spanish names on it, which no Christian can read.” He could not read in any language, but this did not lessen his sense of aggrievement.