Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [240]
Campbell, nodded and glanced aside, compressing his mouth to a thin line. He reflected for some moments then said, ‘I respect your motives, sir, they show you to be a man of both sense and feeling. But you must realize my position here. There may be loss of life among the troops, if these people make resistance. There may even be damage to the cannon, a serious matter, for which I would be held accountable. Under the circumstances, will you not reconsider? I would think it more reasonable if you were to deduct expenses after the sale, from your half-share, rather than before.’
‘Sir,’ Erasmus said, ‘any loss or damage would be favourably viewed, since it would have occurred in the course of smoking out a nest of vipers in the heart of His Majesty’s Province. That is the kind of energetic action that brings a man to the notice of his superiors. They will think better of you for it than for saving them a few pounds and shillings on the conference expenses. However, I don’t wish to appear unreasonable. As I say, my interest is not only financial. I will lower my figure for expenses by a hundred pounds, but it must still be deductible before the sale of the negroes. Come now, that is the best offer I can make you.’
Campbell’s face still showed some reserve. With a sense of timing rivalling that of the masterly Watson, Erasmus chose this moment to say, with studied nonchalance, ‘It would be a private matter between us, of course, I would not ask for any accounting. I would take my half in cash if possible, or in bills of credit, and the other half would be made over to you, together with all receipts and records of the sale. I am content to leave the matter in your hands for the better governance of this new Colony of Florida.’
‘Sir,’ Campbell said, ‘here is my hand on it. Give me three days. The Creeks will be drunk for that time on the rum we shall give them and our full force will be needed in case of disturbance. After that they will disperse. Three days, and the men and the guns will be placed at your disposal. You have my word.’
They drank to this, and shook hands again, before parting for the night. Alone in his room, Erasmus lay hot and sleepless, excited by thoughts of lawful profit and just retribution. His plans had knitted together most wonderfully. Somewhere to the south of him Matthew Paris was lying at this moment, asleep or awake, with no knowledge of the nemesis that was drawing near. He had no doubt now that his cousin was there, was alive, was waiting, he too, though unconsciously, for this last act to be played out between them. The nightmare fears that Paris might be dead or somehow beyond his reach had gone now: Paris was necessary to the completeness of things, to the workings of justice, and so he must be there. It was a faith almost childlike, and all the faces that came now to visit him in the darkness confirmed it in one way or another, his father’s faces living and dead, the actor in the shipyard sniffing at the fatal timbers, the flushed and handsome dominator of conversation, the staring creature in the candle-light. Sarah’s face came too, stately as Miranda, calm with love, then with tears on the cheeks and some ultimate accusation in the eyes. His wife’s grotesque masks floated before him and his mother’s face of recovered health, which he had never been able to forgive. Last, eclipsing the others, the laughing face of the youth who had lifted him away …
Yes, the days were numbered now for cousin Matthew. You will hang by the neck, as my father did, he promised that laughing face. Lying there in the dark he could feel the noose tightening round his cousin’s throat, feel it so surely that it was like a constriction of his own breathing.
PART NINE
FORTY-SIX
The passage of Erasmus’s ship up the coast towards St Augustine had been observed by Hughes the climber, who also noticed the unusual length of time she dallied at anchor. He was high in the branches of a gum-resin tree in a jungle cluster surrounding a freshwater pool where white-tail