Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [117]
‘Indeed, sir?’ Paris looked at the immobile, brick-coloured face, the small blue eyes that seemed now once again, this avowal or confession having been made, to seek for refuge further back and find none. The surgeon felt touched, though knowing this confidence quite probably came only because the captain despised him. It was the first in any case that Thurso had ever made. ‘You were brought up by relatives then, sir?’ he ventured, rather diffidently; he had learned that the captain suspected the motives behind all questions.
‘I was brought up by the parish.’ Thurso’s face had become more forbidding. ‘The sea has been father and mother to me,’ he said. ‘Aye, and more.’ He fell silent now and looked fixedly before him in one of the fits of dark abstraction that Paris had noticed in him before.
The river had narrowed. As they went closer in to the bank Paris saw the gauze and glint of honey bees high up among the small white flowers of the mangroves and caught the brackish smell from the ooze at their roots. Voices came from somewhere among the trees. They passed a landing stage made with moored rafts where women squatted, washing clothes at the waterside.
‘Yes,’ Thurso said, ‘Tucker may be a mulatto, but he is a man to be reckoned with.’ He spoke as if there had been no interval. Small beads of sweat had started on his brow and he wiped them away with a cambric handkerchief from his sleeve, in a gesture oddly delicate for a man of his bulk. ‘There are times he might have as many as fifty prime slaves in his pens,’ he said. ‘Of course he has some customs we might object to, as coming from more civilized society. For example he has more than one wife – seven or eight, I believe. Now we might think that little better than fornication, but it is their practice hereabouts. He knows my feelings, but I don’t let it stand in the way of business. Besides, you see, there is a sound practical reason at the back of it, which you have to know these parts properly to appreciate. Just counting his own blood kin and relations by marriage, he can send upwards of a hundred men raiding up-river, and when you add to that his personal slaves and people that are in bond to him … He gives out credit to the people when they fall on bad times. They all owe him money. They know they can be sold for slaves to pay off the debt, so they take care to keep on the right side of him. There is nothing like fear, for keeping people in order. No, Tucker has got things very well in hand considering that he came to this coast with nothing.’
The river took a wide curve between banks of low shrub; the trees had been cleared here on both sides. Their guides waited above a balustraded wooden jetty where a boat was unloading plantains in wicker baskets. On the bankside beyond, lines of washing were hanging. Tucker himself was waiting at the top of the wooden steps that went up from the jetty. He was a tall, stout patriarch, light brown in colour, with a reverend poll of white hair. He greeted his visitors with dignified ease and led them through a square compound formed by low huts where women sat in the shade preparing food and small children disputed the dust with chickens.