Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [26]
He saw Barton raise his head in the same alert, dog-like way, as if sniffing for the right line to take with the owner’s son. The movement raised his throat slightly clear of the red silk choker he was wearing and exposed the upper part of a pale, puckered scar, which ran for some four inches along the side of his neck, revealing with an ugly fidelity the curve of the cut that had made it. ‘The hull curves two ways, sir,’ he said, ‘beggin’ your pardon, that is what makes the job ticklish-like, as you rightly say.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well now, a ship’s hull.’ Barton’s voice had a sudden energy of pleasure in it. He raised a brown hand, palm upwards, fingers slightly curled. ‘Think of a fourth portion of a orange what you have took the peel off it all in one piece, if you think of that portion of peel, sir, the edges will curve inwards top and bottom and at the same identical time that peel will curve along its length, fore and aft. It is the same thing with a ship’s hull. Every blessed one o’ them planks has to fit snug against the next along its length and by its depth.’
It was clear that Barton had a way with words; there had been a savouring, lingering quality in this; he was smiling still with pleasure at the comparison. ‘That is what makes it ticklish-like,’ he said.
Kemp and Thurso had turned back towards them. Four of the men had begun to climb to the platform, a double plank in width, slung against the battens. The men by the kiln were wrapping rags round their hands.
‘They are fetching the next pieces out,’ Kemp said to his son. ‘They have been steaming long enough – near eight hours. We shall stay and see them laid in place.’
Erasmus saw the great oak plank drawn smoking from the kiln. It must have been thirty feet long. Six men, their hands swathed in rags, went at a crouching walk with it across the dozen yards to the ship’s side. Here it was roped and hoisted from above – men had been waiting on the cross-pieces of the unfinished deck, high up in the smoky brightness, difficult to see. He watched the plank hauled to the level of the platform, saw it manhandled into position against the batten markers, saw it driven into place with heavy mallets, the blows sounding in ragged unison as the men forced the heavy timber to bend in obedience to the curving shape of the hull. Once in place it was held there against the strain of its cooling fibres with thick wooden billets that fitted flush against the plank and were bolted through and locked on the inside of the vessel.
‘By God, those two fellows are putting their backs into it,’ Kemp said in tones of approval.
It was not quite flush, Erasmus noticed: the billets amidships, where the convex curve was greatest, did not seem long enough, and had to be lashed to the bolt-heads; the two men his father had referred to were hauling at the short ropes, leaning back on their narrow platform to get a better purchase.
Kemp took out his watch and consulted it. ‘Less than fifteen minutes to get that timber in place.’
Thurso was beginning, in his laborious, impeded way, to say something in reply, when there was a wrenching sound from the ship’s side, followed at once by a strangely tuneful twanging note, like a single vibrant beat of pinions. Erasmus glimpsed a flying shape of white caught in the sun like a flash of wings, saw the gap where the timber had sprung free, sweeping the two men working there off the platform, one to slide down between hull and slipway and lie groaning out of sight, the other, whose fall his eye had caught, flung clear on to the wharfside, where he lay broken and still.
The pause of shock, before the men’s mates moved towards them, was of the briefest; but to Erasmus, when he thought later about it, it had no limits, extending