Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [163]
On the morning of the fourth day, Paris woke feeling weak but clear-headed. His restored senses brought sounds more typical of delirium, a hullabaloo above him of stamping feet, jangling chains, the jaunty persistence of the fiddle: the slaves were at their morning dance. He ate the breakfast provided by Sullivan: ship’s biscuit, in which the occasional weevil was still to be found, and some rock-hard cheddar. He enjoyed both items hugely. He felt sure now that he had been suffering from the same type of fever which had earlier attacked Johnson and True, a kind of swamp fever, he believed, transmitted by the miasmic airs of the coast. If it were the same he could expect further bouts – Johnson had suffered some return of it already, though True so far not.
He dressed slowly and made his way up on deck, where the slaves were still exercising, Libby and Tapley moving among them with whips and curses while McGann and Evans stood to the cannon on the deck above. The whole mid-part of the ship forward of the mainmast moved with this noisy, disorderly seething of the black bodies. They had been hosed down that morning, and the decks washed, and the contents of the ordinary buckets discharged over the sides; but there still came to Paris, as he stood on the side gangway, the sickening fetid smell he had grown to recognize. The timbers were becoming engrained with it. No scrubbing could remove it entirely – they would carry it back with them to Liverpool …
The women and girls moved like sleepwalkers about the deck, sometimes raising their arms and swaying their bodies as if listening to some music more remote than that transmitted by Sullivan’s quick elbow. The men jumped and lumbered in their shackles. Cries and groans and wavering phrases of song came from both men and women, mingling with the cracking of the whips and the heavy stamping of feet and rattling of chains, so that the notes of the fiddle were only intermittently audible. To Paris, with that deceiving clarity that comes after fever – a clarity in which there is still a sort of languid disorder – there came the fancy that Sullivan was sawing at the negroes’ chains. At this moment, with the same sense of heightened but unreliable perception, he saw that some of the younger boys, though moving to the music in apparent dance, were playing a game of ambush and kidnap in among the moving bodies of the adults. They were taking captives, he realized suddenly … With a lurch of feeling he recognized among the dancers the woman who had looked at him in the dungeon of the fort. Her face was lowered now, expressionless. She must have been brought aboard while he lay ill. He looked among the men but could not for the moment make out the Corymantee negroes. The woman had been given the same cotton waistcloth as the others, covering the pudenda but leaving the sides of the thighs bare. The muscles of her haunches flexed smoothly as she turned in the motions of the dance.
He removed his eyes from her to see Cavana come up from the forecastle with the monkey crouched on his shoulder and disappear in the direction of the latrines at the heads. At the same moment Thurso emerged on the starboard side of the quarterdeck with a scowling look of bad temper, Barton immediately behind him. ‘Glad to see you recovered,’ the captain said, though nothing in his face showed pleasure. ‘What the devil was that?’ he said to Barton.
‘A monkey, sir.’
‘Tell the fiddler to stow his noise, will you? They have had enough of his infernal scraping and so have I.’
‘Aye-aye, sir.’
Barton bawled across the intervening space of deck. Libby, who had been waiting for it, nudged the heedless fiddler. The music stopped and the dancing with it. The slaves were herded into their allotted space amidships by the men guarding them, who were eager now to finish and get below – it was close on eight bells.
‘I won’t have that confounded animal running loose on my ship,’ Thurso said. ‘Tell Cavana that.’
‘It sticks pretty close to him from what I have seen,’ Paris said, taking some