Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [215]
He drew the cutlass at his side and went forward. The intensity of his purpose was near to choking him now. He would have braved any danger to get below and find his cousin’s cabin, though what he expected to see there he did not know.
The hatchway was open, though partly grown over with bindweed. The stairs were in place, leading down. At the foot he began to make his way aft again, leaning awkwardly against the portside bulkhead to keep his balance against the tilt. Shafts of light came through from the gaps in the planking overhead. Some yards along he found a skull and a scattering of bones, part of the ribcage still in its hoop. Had Philips mentioned human remains on the ship? He could not remember. An adult this, but whether black or white it was not possible to determine. Hardly big enough to belong to Paris … There were two more skeletons, one of them a child’s, lying a little further, at an angle to the bulkhead.
The discovery, his aloneness in these unaccustomed surroundings, took all guard from his thoughts. As he stood in this dim, cluttered place, he could not defend himself against the knowledge that there had been terrible suffering here, in the heart of the ship; it was as though the timbers gave off the odour of it. It had survived this ruin, would survive the dust the ship was destined to …
This was no more than an aberration, a brief deflection of purpose. Next moment he was shuffling on again, through the broken sunlight. He had been over the vessel often enough with his father to remember where the surgeon’s quarters lay, but the dimensions of the cabin were not so easy to make out now; the light inner bulkhead had fallen in, as if from some splintering blow. There was a litter of old yarn and bits of tackle that had jolted down here with the tilt of the ship. But the frame of the bunk was still there, loose at the foot where it had swung free from the splintered partition.
Erasmus kicked at the rubbish, dislodged a rusted band of iron and some pieces of curved wood, saw beneath these a curled shape, a snake he thought at first, then saw it was part of a belt. He picked it up. The leather had rotted and the buckle was missing, perhaps cut off. It was narrow – not a seaman’s belt. He began to look about him with more purpose. Below where the planking had buckled and split he found a glass stopper with a round lid, of the type apothecaries use for small bottles and phials. This mark of his cousin’s presence was as precious to him as a token of love and he pocketed it with care. However, apart from a small china inkwell, he found nothing more of any interest. It was clear that the cabins had been diligently picked over, and probably more than once.
On the point of leaving, obscurely disappointed, he pushed with a sort of vindictive violence against the frame of the bunk. He felt the head of it swing heavily round, then check against the splintered bulkhead. There was some obstruction there, something reinforcing the partition. Forcing the frame as far as possible from the wall, he saw a small cavity there, which had perhaps been fronted with panelling or some light veneer. He could see nothing inside, there was not light enough, and he was unwilling to put his hand where his eye could not follow it. He found a piece of wood and poked with it in the cavity. His stick encountered some object there that took up nearly all the space. When he reached in, his fingers touched the side of a wooden box.
It seemed to him afterwards that he had known from the first touch what this box would be, so that when he drew it out there was no surprise, only a sense of confirmation. The lacquer was roughened and pitted, but the resinous varnish had held off the damp and the gold and blue design of peacocks on the lid was as clear now in this narrow space where he stood as it had been the afternoon thirteen years ago when amid the tea-cups and the talk of her ailments his mother had made a present of it to Matthew Paris. He remembered with absolute clarity the quality of the light,