Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [108]
It was clear to Erasmus that wagon trains could never bring the quantities needed, even if the roads were improved. The coal would have to come by water. Already the Mersey was navigable by small ships as far as Manchester, and the barges were plying back and forth from Stockport. This had been achieved in the teeth of scoffing unbelievers, by deepening and straightening the river channels. A great feat of engineering – they had reconstructed the river, no less. The skills thus learned could be – must inevitably be, and soon – applied to man-made waterways, which would carry a vastly greater tonnage at a fraction of the cost. Erasmus felt energy course through him at the thought. His imagination might remain untouched by Ferdinand weeping for the king his father’s wreck, or Sarah clinging to a cherished notion of childhood; but it became incandescent at thoughts of transporting a hundred thousand tons of coal a year in your own barges. The future lay in coalfields and canals. He knew it beyond any shadow of question. The men who gained control of these would be the new princes of the city, eminent, powerful, rich beyond the dreams of avarice …
He was happy during these summer weeks. It was to be, in his recollection, a golden time, instinct with a promise and hope that he sensed at many different moments of his day, at home in his room or in the streets of the city or at work, where in addition to the duties normally falling to him – he was responsible now for all the coastal shipping business of the firm and for the movement of raw cotton to Warrington and Manchester – he was applying himself diligently to the study of accountancy and mercantile law.
The season seemed to contain the same promise. It was full tide of green now in the hedges and wasteground on the outskirts of the city, where herons flapped above the marshes and cows grazed and vagrants slept in the long grass among the brick kilns. The willowherb came and the berries began to redden on the rowan trees. The meadows were scythed, the grass lying in long, slightly darker swathes. The slopes of the hills and the edges of the wheat fields echoed to the stuttering song of the yellowhammer, with its mournfully protracted final note. Then the birds fell silent and the stubble lay crepitant and hot, emitting odours of slightly stale sweetness. Summer reached its apogee and began insensibly to wane; and it would have no more been possible to say when this waning began than it would have been to say when William Kemp admitted despair as the companion of his days and with it the lure of death.
TWENTY-SIX
Hunched in his cabin over his journal, Paris contended with sultry heat and general feelings of lassitude. In a way, these discomforts helped his resolve to complete his notes for the day; they were, together with the words themselves, details in the belated evidence of love that he was always offering to Ruth. The entries, however trivial or commonplace, had become links in a chain of communion. He spared no distressing matter, feeling that this too, all that he was enduring on the ship, could somehow be offered to her in terms of love and contrition.
Our privileged position for trading has not lasted very long. We have now been anchored here ten days and woke this morning to find two ships in the offing, a Frenchman and a Bristol slaver named the Edgar, whose captain Thurso is acquainted with – a man named Macdonald.
The presence of the French ship put our good captain thoroughly out of temper at once. It seems that the French are notorious for paying high prices, and this because they can sell their negroes dearer in their own colonies than can we in ours. And so they ruin the trade for the English. Thurso clenched his fists when he spoke of it and flushed up very dark, and those strangely unprotected-looking eyes of his that I have spoke of before went glancing all over the deck as if he hoped to find a Frenchman handy whom he could seize