Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [16]
The lake was reedy at the edges and rimmed with pale artificial shores of sand. A rowboat lay tethered on the far side. On the shore to his right, between the water and the trees, a structure to represent a cavern had been made with branches and canvas. Before this, on the sand, a group of people stood close together. One of them was Sarah. She was in a blue dress and a broad-brimmed sunhat tied below the chin. No one had seen him yet. Sarah said, in a clear, excited voice, ‘I’ll read Ferdinand, if you like.’ She took a pace forward, holding up her book:
Where should this music be? i’ th’air or th’earth?
It sounds no more …
As she glanced round to catch the dying echoes, her gaze fell upon Erasmus, who was still standing motionless at the edge of the trees. ‘Heavens,’ she said. ‘It is Erasmus Kemp. Where did you come from?’
‘I came to see Charles.’ Erasmus shouted the lie across the water. His heart was beating heavily. He made a gesture towards the trees.
‘Pat he comes, right on cue.’ This from a portly, loud-voiced fellow who alone among them had made an attempt to dress for the part: he wore a red calico morning-gown and had a sort of wizard’s turban of the same colour on his head. The schoolmaster, Erasmus thought, seeking with immediate jealousy to identify all around her. The curate, Parker, was easy enough to pick out – he had retained his clerical collar.
Sarah quitted the group and came round the lakeside towards him, over the sand, lifting the skirts of her dress. Watching her, not moving, he was briefly aware again of the setting, the water, yellow of broom on the rising ground beyond and scattered sheep grazing; and the strangeness of it came to him: the actors had become spectators, they were all watching him and Sarah. Then his vision narrowed to the young woman approaching him and he felt a pang at the beauty of her present slight disablement, the way the long dress and the soft sand impeded her.
‘Oh, Erasmus,’ she exclaimed, while still some yards off. ‘I am so glad you thought to visit.’ Excitement had dispelled constraint, she was regarding him boldly. ‘Just when we needed someone,’ she said, with a smiling air of wonder, ‘you appeared like a spirit.’
Erasmus cleared his throat. ‘Well, I am mortal,’ he said, and she may have seen something in his eyes to corroborate this, for her look became cooler.
‘Jonathan Rigby fell off his horse and he has broke a leg,’ she said.
‘I am sorry to hear that.’ He was bewildered. This Jonathan Rigby was someone he knew only slightly. ‘I hope ’twas not a bad break.’
‘No, it isn’t that. You see, we are doing a play called The Enchanted Island and he was our Ferdinand, but he can’t do it now. You could take his place if you liked.’ She looked him in the eye for a moment and said in lower tones, ‘If you liked to please me, that is.’
SIX
‘So that is satisfactory to you and all agreed? We are allowing you five pounds per month wages and four pounds out of every one hundred and four pounds net proceeds of negroes, gold, ivory etc., and in lieu of your private adventure we admit you to be concerned with us two hundred and twenty-five pounds in the cargo. Your chief mate is to have three negroes privilege, your second mate two. There is to be a surgeon with the ship and he shall have three negroes privilege.’
‘Surgeon?’ It was not Saul Thurso’s habit to inflect his voice much; years of bawling against the wind had reduced it to a single hoarse and grating level. ‘We are not bound to carry a doctor with us.’
‘Well, of course I know that,’ Kemp said. ‘I do not send him because I am obliged to do so. I send him for reasons of humanity.’
Thurso considered for some moments, looking