Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [169]
Thurso said nothing more. He stood with feet planted on the deck. After a while he raised his head and sniffed for a wind. Cavana waited some minutes, looking straight before him, hands gripped tight to the wheel. Then, very slowly, he turned his head and studied the captain’s face in profile as if trying to memorize the features.
Later that evening Thomas True died. A man of few words and unclean habits, he had had no friends aboard. Libby sewed him into his blanket and within half an hour of his last breath he was consigned to the sea, Thurso officiating in his usual hoarse mutter, barely audible except to those nearest him. As usual he omitted the lesson, confining himself to the short final office: ‘We therefore commit his body to the deep, to be turned into corruption, looking for the resurrection of the body, when the sea shall give up her dead, and the life of the world to come …’
Thurso paused here before continuing. It was the briefest of pauses but every member of the crew knew the reason for it. Startling in the silence, unmistakable, there had come a long fluttering sigh through all the ship’s canvas, first breath of a rising wind.
PART SEVEN
THIRTY-FOUR
The ship Thurso sent by made quick passage and the letters were in Kemp’s hands within a month.
‘He is leaving without his full complement of negroes,’ Kemp said to his son as they sat together in their office overlooking the waterfront. ‘He declares himself short by twelve.’
They sat at the mahogany table, on whose polished surface objects – jeweller’s scales, a set of weights in silver, an ivory paper-knife, a japanned box – were reflected so deeply and with such lustre that they seemed afloat there. The February afternoon was cold and a banked fire of sea-coal burned in the grate behind them with flickering, rose-blue flames. The sky through the window was gravid with snow and the river ran slate-grey and sullen, half obscured by the warehouses and storage sheds along its nearside bank.
‘Matthew says little beyond that he is well and in good spirits,’ Kemp said, passing over his nephew’s letter. ‘I do not know how Thurso computes that twelve. The commonly accepted figure for capacity is two negroes for every unit of tonnage. The Liverpool Merchant is a hundred and two tons and so he is eight short, not twelve, by my reckoning.’ He had aged in appearance of recent weeks; he had lost colour and the flesh of his cheeks had loosened and sagged. But he was as master of the facts as ever. ‘That is allowing for headroom between the platforms of two foot six inches,’ he added.
Erasmus looked down at the brief lines of his cousin’s letter. He could see no reference to good spirits in it. Paris sent his best respects, was in good health, asked to be remembered to his aunt and cousin. The rather large, angular characters recalled the surgeon’s physical being strongly and disagreeably to Erasmus. He remembered the subfusc suit, the awkward courtesy, the pale, lined face. That disgraced presence at the dinner table … Erasmus almost never revised opinion or reinterpreted experience. Enmity was like a sort of faith with him. After some moments he found that his teeth had clenched hard together with aversion.
‘Of course,’ his father said, ‘Thurso is an experienced man, no doubt he has ways of disposing the negroes so as to make the most of the space. It seems there has been a case of virulent infection among them, very dangerous if it takes hold. A bloody flux. But he has hopes that by a prompt departure now and with God’s grace a favourable passage, he will bring them without more loss to the West Indies.’ Kemp paused a moment, looking up through the window at the charged clouds. Then he said, ‘I hope I have not been mistaken in the reliance I have placed on Captain Thurso.’
Erasmus felt an obscure distress. It was like a betrayal, the breaking of a