Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [298]
‘Yes, sir, I did. Him an’ Mr Delblanc. They talked about settin’ up a kind o’ colony in the wilderness, where men could live in a state o’ nature.’
‘In a state of nature? What the plague does that mean?’
‘Curse me if I know.’ With instant responsiveness Barton’s tone had changed to match the amused contempt he saw come to Erasmus’s face. ‘They talked a lot about freedom an’ justidge,’ he said. ‘They was goin’ to found a colony where everybody would be equal an’ have no use for money.’
‘That den of thieves.’ Erasmus, suddenly, was smiling. There is a broad division between those who laugh at the perception of incongruities in the world and within themselves, and those in whom laughter is released as a celebration of their own successes, a perception, not of incongruity but of total, triumphant correspondence. Erasmus was of this latter sort. Everything had fallen into his hands. He had Paris alive; the guilt was confirmed, the evidence overwhelming; in Barton he had found an instrument of justice infinitely pliable. And now to hear of these ridiculous aspirations … It was like crystal sugar on the cake. ‘By God, that’s rich,’ he said.
And Barton, seeing his new protector’s smile deepen, felt something of the delight of one who has found the key to a puzzle he had feared might be too intricate. ‘They thought they could start afresh,’ he said, with contemptuous indulgence.
FIFTY-FOUR
Through the hours of darkness Paris lay on the borderlines of fever, where thought and dream and sleeping and waking are confused together. Towards morning the throbbing of his wound eased for a while and he entered a phase of clearer recollection. He was back again in the public room of Norwich Jail, with its dark, greasy walls and echoing pavement and the usual lords of the place, violent criminals all, occupying the coveted area round the fireplace. One of these he remembered in particular, and even his name, Buxton, a man convicted for robbery on the highway, on appeal for his life, a broken-toothed, staring fellow of unpredictable mood. It was Buxton, wearing a towel on his head tied up in knots in imitation of a judge’s wig, who had presided at the ‘trial’ of the young debtor. The mock-serious expression of this unbalanced ruffian was present to Paris’s mind as vividly now as if there had been no interval, as was the lost and frightened look of the young man. The two faces had remained in his memory side by side, Buxton and Deever, natural complements one to the other. Two hours in the pillory had been the sentence of this court. With his head through the legs of a chair and his hands tied up to the sides, Deever had stood stock-still in full view, head thrust forward tortoise-like below its absurd carapace, too afraid to do more than absorb his shame …
I did not intervene, Paris thought. Perhaps I lacked courage, perhaps I was afraid I might make things worse for him. It was impossible now to be sure. Memory, which still retained clearly enough the impressions of sight – Buxton with his grotesque trappings of justice, the flushed and humiliated face of the young man – did not permit any exact recollection of feeling. Certain it was that he had done nothing; the victim had been released finally on the promise of five shillings.
But what chiefly occupied him now, as the first light strained through the port of his cabin, was not his failure to protest or intervene, but his failure to learn the lesson so conveniently offered. For the men who did this cruel thing had suffered themselves in real courts and had been condemned.
I should have known it then, he thought. Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way … Was it always wrong then to believe that the experience of suffering would soften the heart? Those who were fond of declaring that they understood human nature would no doubt conclude so. But as the light strengthened slowly, enabling him to make out the bare furnishings of his cabin, it came to Paris that he did not want