Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [146]
‘What are you talkin’ about?’ Barton demanded. ‘How dare you come here with this riggermarool talk o’ fiddlin’? Don’t you know you should have gone through one of the officers?’
As often happened with Sullivan, his initial fear – strong enough to have kept him hesitating long at the door – had diminished now in the warmth and justice of his own advocacy. ‘Beggin’ your pardon, sir, but I was askin’ meself if the chains could be taken off.’
‘Taken oft?’
‘Just for the period of me playin’,’ Sullivan said.
Thurso’s brows had drawn together in a ferocious frown. For a few moments he said nothing. Then they saw his mouth move in a curious grimacing, stretching way, almost convulsive in appearance. He raised his face as if about to sneeze and a series of hoarse, choking sounds came from somewhere deep in his throat. After a moment or two, the others regarding him meanwhile in astonished silence – neither of them had any idea to begin with what ailed him, never having seen such symptoms in him before – he took out a capacious handkerchief and wiped his eyes.
‘By God, that’s rich,’ he said. ‘I haven’t heard anything so rich for a long time. Did you hear him, Barton? This gut-scraper wants the chains taken off ’em because the noise is spoiling his music.’
‘He must be out of his senses,’ Barton said blankly.
Thurso turned to Paris, traces of tears still in his eyes. ‘Here is another fellow of the same kidney as yourself,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t know what is the real world either.’
Paris looked at the fiddler in silence for a moment. Then he said, without smiling, ‘I don’t disdain the connection, if he doesn’t.’
Sullivan was too concerned with bearing himself properly to look the surgeon in the eye; but the grace of these words went to his heart and he never repeated them to anyone, not even Blair. Everything else he recounted later in the forecastle with considerable embellishment and dramatic licence. ‘I put me arguments fair an’ square,’ he said. ‘I gave me reasons. Not surprisin’ they refused me – Thurso has no feelin’ for music any more than a toad. “If that is the case,” I says to them, “you might as well not have employed a fiddler at all.” An’ I turns on me heel …’
Under the chaffing attention of his shipmates his spirits rose. He was by nature mercurial; and he felt sure of McGann’s shilling. But the words of kinship, unexpected, unsolicited, as he stood there with his head down and Thurso’s fearsome laughter still in his ears, these were to shine in his memory for ever.
Soon after midnight the first of the land breeze began making along the river and Thurso ordered sail to be got up and all to be made ready for purchasing anchor. At two they weighed and got out to sea, the wind by this time giving a good offing. In the cover of darkness, as quietly as possible, the Liverpool Merchant began to steer a course south-eastward. But when the ship met the deep sea swell, the rhythm of her movement changed and the people in the cramped and fetid darkness of the hold, understanding that they had lost all hope of returning to their homes, set up a great cry of desolation and despair that carried over the water to the other ships in the road and the slaves in the holds of the ships heard it and answered with wild shouts and screams, so that for people lying awake in villages along the shore and for solitary fishermen up before dawn, there was a period when the night resounded with the echoes of lamentation.
PART SIX
THIRTY-TWO
It was an uneventful voyage, apart from the attempt of one negro to put an end to his life by severing the veins of his neck with his nails. While dressing the wounds Paris learned from Jimmy that the man had been falsely convicted of witchcraft and sold to pay his fine. ‘Very good way for make money,’ Jimmy said. ‘Man got nothin’. So they sell ’em.’
They rounded the cape and came to anchor in eleven fathoms, abreast of the river and within sight of the fort. Their