Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [294]
When he opened his eyes again, he found himself gazing up at the face of Erasmus Kemp, close above him. He was not conscious of any interval of doubt or any struggle for recognition. He regarded the face silently, noting with a strange sort of dispassion that it was clean-shaven and very pale and that the dark eyes held a singular brightness and intensity. He felt a certain wonder at the sight, but not really surprise: in a way it seemed natural, and even inevitable, that his cousin should be here to preside over the last hours of the settlement. The older Kemp had given, though inadvertently; now the younger had come to take away. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘you have come to claim your father’s cargo.’
To Erasmus this reference to his father seemed the height of unrepentant insolence. Looking down, he saw the lop-sided smile he detested appear on his cousin’s face. ‘I have come to hang you,’ he said, striving to keep all passion out of his voice. He took in the details of Paris’s appearance, the beard, the sunburn, the long hair tied behind. ‘I would not have known you but for that rascally Barton pointing you out,’ he said with disgust. His cousin’s shirt – and this seemed to Erasmus almost more heinous than anything – reached scarcely to his navel, having been cut off all round, apparently to make patches. The garment he wore below it was little more than a loincloth. His naked, long-shanked legs were outstretched on the ground, the left one a mess of blood below the knee. Erasmus had felt a leap of alarm at first sight of this damage; but the wound after all was not serious – the leg could be dressed in St Augustine. ‘Have no fear, you will walk to the gallows,’ he said.
Paris looked beyond his cousin to the sky, which in this short while seemed to have become much brighter. The gulls still wheeled there, breasts flashing with light as they turned.
‘All in one swoop, pretty nearly,’ Erasmus said, in a tone of satisfaction. He felt the need to drive his triumph home. ‘None of the troops got a scratch.’
Paris wanted to ask about Kireku and whether any others of the settlement had been hurt. But he saw Erasmus turn at this moment and speak to someone approaching. ‘Ah, so you have it ready,’ Erasmus said. ‘It has taken you time enough.’
Two men came into Paris’s field of vision, carrying a blanket slung on poles to make a stretcher. Erasmus looked down again and his eyes had a light of fever. ‘Your turn now to be lifted, cousin Matthew,’ he said, words not immediately comprehensible to Paris, though for a moment he felt that he was trembling on the verge of understanding. Then the soldiers began to lift him on to the stretcher, his senses swam and the bright gulls dissolved in the sky above him.
FIFTY-THREE
Privileged by his wound, Paris was conveyed as directly as possible to the shore and rowed out to the ship in the late afternoon. Before midnight both troops and captives had been embarked and the ship set a course northward for St Augustine.
It was Erasmus’s hope that he might avoid the delays of a long sea journey home to England, and the risk of his cousin cheating justice even now by some obscure and private death, by having the people of the crew tried and condemned either at St Augustine by Campbell or, if the latter felt this exceeded his competence, by the Governor of South Carolina, where the negroes were to be taken and sold. To this end it was important that at least one of the wrong-doers should be persuaded to inform upon his comrades in exchange for a pardon. Erasmus felt that he knew human nature passably well and did not anticipate any problem here. It would come better from a common seaman, one who had taken an active part; an officer of the ship might be able