Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [162]
It seems that I am become an expert on faces. Men like Hughes and Cavana have a savage eye, so intent in regard as to seem almost innocent, with that sort of fierce innocence which has known no chastening or softening. I saw that expression again on the faces of the Gold Coast negroes who stared at us through their bars. I do not know if the woman belonged with that group. Thurso had already looked them over and purchased them before I was stirring next morning, having apparently agreed on a price with the governor the night before. She is tall, like them, but lighter skinned, tawny rather than black, and her hair not so wiry. I am cursed with too much doubt, or compunction – I do not know what to call it. Perhaps it was only a figment of that mood of hope that came to me as I walked behind Saunders through those passages. But it was as if she waited there, in the sunlight …
Cavana came aboard mid-morning with a monkey on a rope, a bright-eyed little creature with tufted ears and a tail longer than itself, and very prettily coloured – a black crown on him and a small white face, and arms and feet pale orange colour. Cavana is very taken with it, though he does not like to appear so, at least not to me, I think out of some sort of shyness. Blair speaks to me freely since we treated Calley’s back together and he told me they had gone ashore soon after sunrise with Haines to get firewood and shoot pigeons, of which there are large flocks at present in the trees just a little back from the shore. While there they had met a party from the American grain ship in the road with us, who were on the same business. One of these had the monkey and seeing Cavana much taken with it had offered to sell it to him. Cavana had no money but he had a silver chain round his neck, his only possession. On the kind of impulse which seems common with these men when they want something that is before their eyes, he pulled this off and offered it in exchange. To my less impulsive nature this seemed extravagant, but I could tell that Blair would have done the same thing. The creature sat quite comfortably on Cavana’s shoulder, turning its muzzle to look at our faces and raising the skin on its scalp in a very comical way, as if it were constantly being surprised by the tenor of our conversation.
Thurso will not be back for some days yet. There is some mystery about his absence, as there is about our lingering here at all. Why trade for negroes through the fort, if prices are higher? Thurso is not a man to pay more than he needs, and it cannot be that he wishes to keep good relations for the future, as Barton once let fall to me that this is the captain’s last voyage. I believe he has come down to this stretch of coast with some private purpose, and that Barton is privy to it …
Paris laid down his pen. He was feeling distinctly unwell. The heaviness in his limbs had intensified and his temples throbbed painfully with any slightest movement of his eyes. He made himself a strong infusion of powdered cinchona bark and took to his bed, where within an hour he was experiencing the first assaults of a violent fever.
There followed a period for Paris undistinguished by passage of hours, marked only by alternations of sweating and shivering. In the lulls he continued to dose himself within infusions of cinchona and battled to repair his copious sweats with lemon water.
Sullivan, who had taken over from Charlie the duty of seeing to the surgeon’s wants – Thurso would not have given permission to a fore-the-mast man to do it – came that evening at the change of watch, found his charge muttering and tossing and conversing with shadows and ran to get rainwater from the butt so as to make cold compresses for the surgeon’s face and chest. This had been done to Sullivan by a woman somewhere in his scattered past and it had been a memory of love to him. It was all he knew of treating fevers, but he was assiduous in it, and was a devoted attendant to Paris all through his illness, sponging his brow, running to the galley with dried yarrow leaves from Paris’s stock