Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [296]
Erasmus poured out more rum. In these close quarters he could smell the sharp reek of sweat, mingled with some fishy odour, that came from the other’s body, and he tensed his nostrils against it with involuntary repugnance. There was a glaze of the gutter about Barton that no outdoor living had been able to affect; it was there in the abjectness of the manner, which had something insolent in it too, and in the ragged, jaunty finery of the silk scarf. The voice was husky and dry, for all the rum, making its claims of constancy and fidelity, seeking to find the right note, enlist favour, strike a course that would bring him in safe from wind and wave. Erasmus set no store by the protestations, but he did not interrupt. Barton appeared to be in the grip of his own story now, staring and eager with it.
‘We had to keep ’em under hatches a lot o’ the time, increasing the mortality considerable. I tell you, it would have broke your heart to see it. The doctor worked like a slave himself to keep the beggars in the world …’
Erasmus looked up sharply at this and found the mate’s eyes fixed on him in a sort of stealthy appraisal, disturbing in one whom he had thought so lost in his narrative. ‘What are you looking at?’ he said. ‘Do you mean Paris?’
‘Aye, him. Feed ’em with his own hand, he would. That would be your cousin, I believe, sir, on the materlineal side?’
‘What is that to you?’ Erasmus said violently. He was silent for some moments. Then, more calmly, he said, ‘He did no more than his duty, I suppose.’
‘No, sir. Well, on the materlineal side, so they say, it is not so strong.’ No change had occurred in the mate’s voice but there was a certain cautious relaxation in the peering expression of his face and the spread of his elbows on the table. He had found a direction. ‘He only done what he was paid to do,’ he said after a moment. ‘We all done that, every man of us. This is a excellent quality o’ rum, sir.’
‘I don’t want to know your opinion of the rum. Here, damn you, have some more. How did Thurso die?’
‘There was various wounds, but the cause o’ death was stabbin’.’
‘Who struck the blow?’
Barton narrowed his eyes as if in a sustained effort of memory. ‘Things was confused,’ he said. ‘It is long years ago now, sir, an’ my remembrance is not clear.’
‘You had better endeavour to clear it,’ Erasmus said. ‘I shall want to know these things from you.’
‘I dare say it will all come floodin’ back to me in the course o’ time. Anyhow, it was the ship’s people that killed Thurso. They rose on him. I spoke out agin it. With Barton, duty always comes first. They would have killed me but they was stopped from it by Mr Delblanc, he was a passenger aboard, an’ by the doctor.’
‘What part did he play? Mr Paris, I mean. He was the leader, then? He led the others into this mutiny?’
Barton paused. There was no doubt expressed on his face, only a kind of intensified alertness. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, ‘he was the leader, without the shadder of a doubt.’
‘Was he the first to raise his hand against the captain?’
‘In a manner o’ speakin’, he was. You see, sir, we had decided to jettison a good part o’ the cargo. That is, the captain had decided it an’ he put it to me an’ Haines an’ the carpenter, Barber, the night before. Haines was the bos’n. The second mate was dead by then of a putrid fever and so we was the only officers left, if you don’t count the –’
‘Jettison them? You mean throw them overboard?’ Erasmus passed a hand over his brow. ‘What, alive as they stood, and fettered?’
‘Only them that was sickly, sir. We knowed we could never make Kingston market with ’em. An’ if we did, we could not have sold ’em, they was too far gone. The worst o’ the weather was over but we was blown far westward, Jamaica was a good ten days off by the captain’s reck’nin’, even in fair conditions. The water was givin’ out, we was already on half a pint a day. We was wastin’ water on the negroes, d’you see, sir, because they was dyin’ anyway. That is not a efficient use o’ resources.