Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [150]
What he might meet he did not know. No one can keep account of damage done to himself. We imagine we have absorbed the shock, the harm, but we have merely caged it, and not in a strong cage either. It waits within the bars for a signal. And however long the wait may be, the leap is always unerring; a man can after twenty years be struck by a horror he thought he had forgotten and it will be green and fresh as ever. Often the pounce comes before the mind knows the signal, as it came to Paris now with the smell of the dank stone, the smell of degradation somewhere ahead of him, a horror almost incredulous that he was lost here, in this place, that he, who had prided himself on his vigilant clarity of mind and ruined himself for it, could have been his own self-deceiver, could have made his own despair a reason for compounding the misery of the world, and that he could have called this monstrous egotism self-abnegation and offered it to a dead woman as a proof of love. The dead could only be mourned. Love is for the living, he thought suddenly, and the thought dispelled his fear.
A final turn brought them to the slave-dungeons, set side by side like cells, with barred fronts and stone walls and high barred windows, through which the afternoon sun was falling now in straight rays; he had been right, they were at the rear of the fort, against the outside walls. Three of the dungeons were occupied now, two with men handcuffed together in pairs and one with unshackled girls and women. Sunlight for this hour was caged there with them. Motes of dust moved with gauzy flies through the bright air. The bodies of the slaves were flecked and stippled and the straw that covered the earth floors was luminous gold. The smells of excrement and trodden straw seemed like a release of this flooding warmth of sunshine. Through the barred embrasures in the walls, Paris heard the hammering again, much closer now, a double-stroke, impatient and swift, metal on wood. Then he saw that one of the women had come forward and was standing pressed against the bars in a shaft of sunlight. She was looking directly at him – he saw the gleam of her eyes. But her face was shadowed. Sunlight fell on her from the window behind, her face and head were edged with fire. She was naked but he took in little of her form beyond that she was slender and straight-shouldered. She was somehow protected from closer scrutiny by her stillness, which struck him suddenly as sacramental, and by the edging of fire around her. He looked at her steadily but she did not look away. He had a moment of slight dizziness, as if he had made some too precipitate movement.
‘Thirty-six in all,’ Saunders said. ‘We are expecting a batch from up country.’
In this stronger light Paris saw that the factor was younger than he had at first supposed, perhaps not much more than twenty, though much wasted by some recent fever. ‘What is that persistent hammering?’ he asked.
‘There has been an outbreak of jail fever among the garrison troops,’ Saunders said. ‘There are two more dead of it since yesterday. The carpenters are making coffins for the dead. It has not touched the slaves, I am glad to say.’
‘Shall we get to business?’ Thurso said. ‘We have had enough talking round the matter.’ Away from the oppression of the drawing-room and the governor’s presence, he was himself again, in his proper element, with the penned creatures and the bargaining. ‘Those are never Wika people, those men there,’ he said, pointing towards a group of tall, very robust negroes. ‘See those heads, Mr Paris? Look at the limbs of those men, see how they stare back at us. Those are Corymantee negroes, Mr Saunders. What are they doing so far west?’
‘There is a story to that,’ Saunders said, a little uneasily as it seemed.
‘I warrant there is.’
‘They were taken from a Dutch slaver returning from Elmina.’
‘Taken? How do you mean? Are you saying the Dutchman was already slaved and they were taken off her?’
‘She wasn’t fully slaved, she was still trading. She had about twenty Gold Coast negroes