Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [141]
Trade is slowing down. The local dealers will very seldom bring a slave to the ship to sell, and the boat trade is dearer and more precarious. As a consequence, whenever any do bring a slave, Thurso is obliged to accept him, being in fear that if he refuses, he will not get the chance of another. Meanwhile, the French are rumoured to be paying eighty bars for an adult male. ‘The crappos are trying to ruin us,’ Barton said. I do not know whom he means by ‘us’; the ruin has been total for some aboard this ship already. I suspect we shall be leaving here soon and proceeding further along the coast to eastward, now that trade is slackening. We have lost two slaves and several more look very listless and low and will scarce move except they are whipped, though I cannot determine any disease in them. It is as if they cannot emerge from the shock of their capture …
Sometimes in storm weather the shore had fluttered with disabled swallows. They crouched lower for his approach, without strength to escape. In his hands they pulsed with that same pulse. He had taken a bird and warmed it between his hands or inside his jacket, brought the life back until it was able to fly. Sometimes, released from his hands, they circled once around him before flying away; in gratitude, or so the child had believed – and the belief had survived all the man’s science.
It was Wilson who had come upon the dead woman. He told the story at the time favoured for stories, in the first of the twilight, before the night watch was set, when it was still early enough for most men to be on deck.
The captain was making his usual walk on the weather side of the quarterdeck, twelve paces forward, twelve back; Barton stood alone on the lee side and Johnson was at the weather gangway, mending a tear in his jacket by the lamp there. Haines, having seen to the coiling of the ropes, was smoking a pipe with Morgan in the galley. Two of those on half-watch, Hughes and True, were amidships guarding the slaves. The others were lying on the forecastle, smoking, talking together. It was a relaxed time on the ship, a time for speculation and hyperbole.
‘She were crawled right under the gangway,’ Wilson said. ‘Behind the gangway ladder, up agin the side. Hardly space for a cat in there. She were crawled under, among some bread butts.’ He had been sent forward with Calley shortly after turning- to that morning to wash down the deck, and had found her there, in the first light of the day, lying on her side, knees drawn up, in the narrow space between the butts. ‘Not a mark on her,’ Wilson said. ‘She must have been took sick and crawled in there.’
There were things about this discovery that Wilson did not speak of to the others. He had thought her asleep. Her back was to him and in the carelessness of her condition the waist-cloth had ridden up over her buttocks to show the brandmark high on the left one. Calley was over on the other side of the deck. There was no one else near. Moving the butts clear, he felt half suffocated with eagerness. By good luck – as he thought – she did not wake. It was his idea to take her from behind while she was still too sleepy to make effective resistance. He had lowered himself against her and had a hand over her mouth before he felt the chill of the body and realized that he was jammed up against a