Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [210]
‘The compensation we receive from the government will take no account of sick or whole, it will be paid on the number of heads and calculated on current prices.’
‘Compensation?’ Erasmus affected a look of frigid puzzlement. ‘Whence comes this notion? Some incubus must have visited your sleep.’
‘They are going to abolish the trade. It is coming, I tell you, there is a bill preparing now. I have it on authority.’
‘A parcel of clerks and petty fellows that hang about the ministries and sell information by the shilling,’ Erasmus said with contempt. It was hardly believable that Jarrold should give credence to such stories. He was a man whose shrewdness and ruthlessness were legendary, who had risen from lawyer’s clerk to merchant banker and amassed a fortune on the way – he was worth half a million at least. In a lifetime of trading he had scarcely touched anything that did not turn to profit. And to be visited now with this quite unfounded but unshakeable fear of the abolitionists, which was like enough to ruin him. No, not fear, more like a need, something he was seeking. The intervention of God, perhaps … It was an unusual kind of thought for Erasmus and he was uneasy at it – uneasy and perplexed: his father-in-law’s career had after all been highly meritorious in its single-minded pursuit of wealth. Even now, in the shadow of this Apocalypse of his own creating, the old man was trying to realize a profit …
‘You will lose by it,’ Erasmus said. ‘A negro is valuable only in terms of the work that can be got out of him in the period immediately after purchase. He is not a capital asset, the merchandise is too perishable. It is not like cattle, you cannot breed him for profit. This movement for abolition of the trade is a chimera, there will be no bill, there are no voices against it but some few members of the Quaker Faction and one or two meddling fools outside parliament. But it is useless to talk to you.’
The money being thus squandered might have ultimately come down to him through his wife. He had thought at one stage of trying to have the old man declared incompetent, but apart from this particular mania he seemed rational enough. The only thing to be hoped was that he might die soon and so limit the damage. Erasmus’s own money at least was not in any danger. He had given instructions for his twelve per cent holding in the bank to be quietly sold in small lots while the stock was still high.
His farewells to his wife on the day of departure were scant in the extreme. He was embarking that evening, the coach was waiting below with Harvey and the baggage already inside. He had to wait while Marie announced him: his wife had lately decided, or been told by one of her friends, that too much ease of access between married persons was vulgar.
As he entered Fritz the poodle yapped at him as usual from its cushion and showed its pink gums. A travestied and unrecognizable woman in a peach-coloured gown, her features concealed behind a mask of greyish, pimpled skin, reclined on a sofa in the dressing-room adjacent to the bedchamber. ‘Is it you, Margaret?’ he said, advancing. ‘What in God’s name is that on your face?’
‘It is a chicken skin,’ she replied in a voice slightly obscured. ‘I am advised by my friend Lady Danby that it is the non plus ultra for restoring one’s complexion.’ The ragged fringe of skin round her mouth moved with the movement of her lips. ‘It has to be a freshly killed bird so as to be moist enough.’
‘So your husband, who is to be away several months, is to make his farewells to a chicken skin.’
‘I cannot see why