Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [3]
Nothing very special then about the Liverpool Merchant. Her purpose was visible from the beginning, almost, of her construction, in the shape of her keel, the gaunt ribs of her hull: a Liverpool snow, two-masted, brig-rigged, destined for the Atlantic trade. But Kemp’s natural optimism had been inflamed to superstition by the mounting pressure of his debts, and his hope in the ship was more than commercial.
He was a sanguine, handsome man, dark-complexioned, with straight brows and bright, wide-open black eyes and a habit of eager gesture that was something of a joke among his generally more stolid acquaintance – a limited joke, because Kemp, at least so far as anyone then knew, was successful in his enterprises and rich, with a wealth he was not reluctant to display: fine stone house in Red Cross Street among the principal merchants of the town; his own carriage with a liveried groom; a wife expensively turned out, though languid-looking – the positive, quick-mannered father and the glowering son together seemed to have drained her.
Father and son looked at each other now, standing beside the still-bleeding mast-pieces in the great draughty shed, divided in their sense of the occasion but with the same handsome brows and dark eyes, wide-open, bright, somehow dazed-looking, showing the same capacity for excess. ‘A thousand oaks to make this ship of mine,’ Kemp said, with satisfaction. ‘D’you know how to tell if the heart of an oak is sound? Veins of dried pith in it, that’s the danger sign, means the wood is rotten. That’s what you look for. Ask these fellows, they know. Pity you can’t do the same with people, eh, lads?’
He was attractive, even in his condescension; there was something magnetic about him. But not all filings will fly the same way, and the visit to the sailmaker’s loft was less successful. Erasmus could never remember how long afterwards this was, or indeed whether it was afterwards at all – his memories of those days had no ordered sequence. But he remembered feeling over-exposed here, in the large square loft brimming with light from its long windows, water-light thrown up from the grey river, austere and abundant, falling without distinction on faces and hands, on the dusty planks of the floor, the low benches, the tarred post in the centre with its rope and tackle for hanging the sails. A horizontal bar came out from this, with a square of thin sail-cloth draped over it.
There were three men on stools, with canvas spread over their knees, two journeymen and the sailmaker, a pale sparse-haired man. It was to him that Kemp spoke, with that warmth of manner that came naturally to him.
‘Well, my friend, and how is the work proceeding?’
The two others had risen at the merchant’s entrance, clutching the work in their laps; but he gave only a single glance upwards, then resumed his stitching. ‘Well enough, as the times are,’ he said.
Erasmus had noted the failure to rise, the absence of respectful title, the implicit complaint. This was some radical, atheist fellow – the yards were full of them. ‘See to your sails, you were best,’ he said. ‘Let those that are fitted for office see to the times.’
The man made no reply. He was stitching the edge of the sail with an extra layer of canvas, using a small iron hook with a cord spliced in it to confine the sail while he worked.
‘Let us leave this fellow to his stitching,’ Erasmus said to his father.
Kemp, however, was not yet deterred. ‘I trust you are making stout sails for my ship?’
‘It is the best hemp flax,’ the sailmaker said, barely pausing in his work.
After a moment or two, as if baffled slightly, Kemp turned to his son. ‘These sails, now,’ he said, with a conscious energy of tone, ‘they cut them out cloth by cloth, the width and depth down to a fraction, depending on the mast or yard they hang from. You need a devilish good eye for it, I can tell you. Ill-made sails will bring a ship to grief, however stout she is else. This fellow now is lining round the edges of the sail to