Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [121]
One by one, under the guard of two men with spears, the negroes were unshackled and brought out, blinking in the stronger light. Paris went through the sequence of peering, prodding and palpating now become familiar, beginning always with the face, the teeth and gums, the red pools between lid and eyeball, the pits of the nostrils. Custom had reduced his repugnance for the task but, perhaps paradoxically, had increased his sense of the humanity of the captives. He was beginning to know, with the same strange combination of sympathy and dispassion, the patterns of colour on an African body, zones of dark and less dark.
There was not the same pulse of fear in these negroes. They had been penned here a week now, and fear had passed into some more quiescent misery. Freed, they moved heavily as if still in chains, performing the kicks and jumps required of them with dazed docility. Three of the men were fine specimens, long-limbed and broad-shouldered, with powerful muscles in the arms and chest; but they were in a nightmare trance like the others and made no resistance. In the second of the women he examined he detected enlarged neck glands. In order to be quite sure of it he lingered for some time, pressing gently at the sides of the woman’s neck.
‘Something wrong?’ Simmonds said. He had been following Paris’s examination with his usual phlegmatic air, whistling between his teeth and occasionally kicking at the slaves, more from habit than anything else, it seemed, as they were quite unresisting.
‘She has greatly enlarged lymph glands,’ Paris said.
‘Let’s have a look. Lift your head up, darlin’.’ Simmonds tapped the woman lightly, almost playfully, under the chin with the back of his hand. ‘Yes,’ he said after a moment. ‘Oh, yes.’ He looked at Owen. ‘We can’t take this one. She has got the negro lethargy, what they calls sleepy-sickness. I seen swellin’s like them before. This here is a dead woman.’
‘I didn’t detect anything,’ Owen said. ‘I gave a good price for her.’
‘That is as may be,’ Simmonds said without emotion. ‘But she is not worth a groat now, to you or anyone. They always dies when they get them balls in the neck.’
The woman remained impassive, staring before her with discoloured eyes. A small pulse beat at her temple. Her mouth hung very slightly open; the everted lips were dark lavender in colour and puffy-looking, as if swollen. If she felt curiosity as to why her captors were spending so long over her, she gave no sign of it. Her gaze showed nothing but an exhausted endurance.
‘Let me see.’ Owen stepped forward, felt the sides of the woman’s neck for some moments, then turned to the others with his uncertain smile. ‘That is nothing, take my word for it,’ he said. ‘It is some feverish inflammation that will soon pass.’
‘I am sorry,’ Paris said, ‘but I fear Simmonds is right. They are glandular tumours, quite prominent. I cannot be mistaken, I felt them quite distinctly. The blood is already morbid in her. I know nothing of how this sickness comes but I believe it is generally fatal. It is here you feel the lumps, towards the vertebral region.’
He touched the woman’s neck again to indicate the place, then felt round the whole area of the neck and shoulders. The skin was smooth and resilient. ‘Here,’ he insisted, ‘in the hinder part of the neck. I am sorry, but we cannot take her.’
‘It seems them fellers bubbled you after all, Mr Owen,’ Simmonds said, and his normally rather bovine expression lightened perceptibly. ‘Nekkid or not,’ he added, winking broadly at Paris, to whom the mate’s jocularity at such a moment seemed insensitive to the point of sublimity.
Owen looked from Paris’s face to that of the woman.