Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [190]
He felt anger at this. She had belittled his sacrifice. With a brief phrase of farewell he turned away. She did not answer, but as he passed out of the room she called loudly after him in a voice that returning tears had made inarticulate – perhaps it was an attempt to call his name.
The declarations had been made already in the course of these interviews with father and daughter; but they needed to be uttered in the shrine of his room, where loneliness and custom could bind them into the sanctity of a vow.
As always, his possessions, things deeply familiar to him, acted on his sensibilities like objects of ritual. The fact that the house and most of its contents would soon be coming under the hammer gave force and fervour to his words, as a promise takes more poignant strength when uttered in the midst of danger and change. Kneeling at his bedside while sparrows chirped their loves in the eaves over the window, he spoke to God and his silver spurs and the pistols on the wall and his mother’s framed embroidery extolling the virtues of the meek.
‘Every penny.’ It was less than a whisper. There were only the slight, plosive sounds of his dry and fervent lips, the click of tongue in the dry mouth. ‘I will restore my father’s good name. I will go into sugar.’
BOOK TWO
1765
PART EIGHT
THIRTY-SEVEN
Sir William Templeton, His Majesty’s Principal Secretary to the West India Office, was at his dressing-table, still in turban and flowered banyan. His levee had scarcely begun. He had just dismissed with promises a half-pay naval officer, unemployed now that the wars with France were ended, who was seeking his influence with the Admiralty but lacked the guineas necessary to assure it.
His footman entered to announce the name of a gentleman on business waiting at present in the ante-room with the others, but not the sort to kick his heels long, the footman remarked – there was between servant and master a close understanding of mutual convenience.
‘He would not be fobbed off,’ the footman said. ‘He has a short way with him, sir.’
‘Aye, and a long purse, you rascal, I make no doubt,’ his master said. ‘He must have shown you the lining of it for you to bring his name with this dispatch.’
Briefly pleased with this piece of wit he twitched thin lips in the looking-glass. His face was narrow and long, very pale beneath the crimson silk of his turban, with a mouth that turned up at the corners in an accidental simper oddly at variance with the generally downward-sloping, lugubrious cast of his features. He knew who this visitor was, though he did not say so to the servant, whose eye was upon him keenly.
‘Where the devil is my hot chocolate?’ he said. ‘Why am I kept waiting in this fashion? Now is the time I need sustenance, sir, as I address myself to the business of the day. Get within and see to it and send Bindman hither to me so I may discuss with him what I shall be wearing.’
‘Yes, sir. And the gentleman?’
‘When you have seen to all that,’ Templeton said with assumed carelessness, ‘you may admit this person.’
He spent the interval before his mirror. Entering, Erasmus Kemp saw the Secretary’s long face, gaudy with rouge just applied but not smoothed in yet, looking fixedly at him in the glass, framed by the swimming or flying putti round the rim and beyond this by the pale blue and rose pink stucco cornucopias round the arches of the recessed bedchamber.
For some moments the two men regarded each other thus. Then Templeton rose and advanced with languid affability, taking short and mincing steps in his loose Turkish slippers. ‘My dear sir, curse me, this is a pleasure,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Will you take a seat, sir?