Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [207]
He was alone now in his office. In the larger room adjoining, the clerks still laboured at their long counter, heads studiously lowered – he could see the line of heads and backs if he chose to, through the spyhole set in his door. The offices were at the rear of the building, looking towards the quiet courts south of St Paul’s. The din of the streets was muted here. The evening had darkened early and he had lit the lamp on his desk. Behind him a fire burned in the grate with a faint, persistent whispering.
He took the logbook from his drawer and began to look through it again. He saw an entry for November 1752, again with a name – it was names he paused at:
… bartered with a frenchman for 4 anchs of brandy. Bought 13 cwt rice of Tucker’s people. They brought a man slave aboard, but it being late … promised to bring him off betimes in the morning …
A musty odour came to him from the softened, slightly swollen pages. Misfortune was apparent even through the bare entries that had survived: No slant of wind any way, he read. Buried a woman of a fever which destroyed her in 5 days. There are now 67 lost and still in the …
It was near the end of the log, on a page largely effaced, that he found what all this while he had been looking for:
… sea breeze came in but soon overpowered by a smart tornado obliging us to furl all and come to anchor in 25 fathoms … Following morning when hatches raised found 4 slaves dead in their irons. My cnsllr tells me jettison the sick. The men are muttering against me, they are given countenance by Paris who sets himself … sorry now I gave passage to …
The name that followed was illegible. Erasmus read through the entry again with utmost care. When he looked up it was with a feeling of gratitude he did not yet understand, though it was fierce enough to contort his face. His cousin had been there then, still alive at the end – for the log was finished now, only a page remained, and that quite illegible. Paris had played a part in what had happened to the ship …
The abbreviation puzzled him somewhat. He could not understand who might have given Thurso this advice – there was no doubt now that this was Thurso’s log. Perhaps the first mate. His mind went back to a day at the shipyard when he had seen them come round together, passing through the shadows of the ship’s bows, out again into the sun, the heavy, deliberate captain and the sharp-faced mate. Barton, his name. He had lifted his head and sniffed at the breeze like a dog …
His thoughts reverted to his cousin, settled on him slowly and with curious care, as though aiming. The clumsy, laughing boy with the sleeves too short who had lifted him away from his failure on the beach, thereby becoming a mortal enemy; the studious youth of his mother’s recommendations; the pale man with the lined face and the hedge-parson’s hat and the shadow of misfortune and disgrace upon him … He was unable to imagine how his cousin might look now; but he knew him in that moment for a leader of mutiny, a man with blood on his hands.
It must be so, if Philips was to be believed: they must have murdered the captain. They had hauled the ship out of sight of the land, hacked down her masts. They could never have intended to return. Return to what? They had taken the negroes off her. That was theft – they had appropriated the ship’s cargo and carried it to shore. So there was piracy to add to the other counts. White men and black men living together with no chief. Not only Thurso’s blood. My father, waiting for his ship to come home, scanning the maps …
Afterwards it came to seem to him that the intention had been formed then, with the quiet sound of the fire behind him and the faint rattle of traffic coming through from Cheapside. But it was not until some days later that he knew beyond question that he had to go, had to see – and not just the wreck. He knew it by the desolation that swept through him at the thought that Philips might have left already, might be out of his reach.