Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [49]
It was some time before Erasmus could collect himself sufficiently to take in the words, though he understood the matter was grave, as all matters touched on by Charles seemed to be. At twenty-one he had acquired already his father’s habit of weighty pauses. This natural solemnity made him effective in the role of Stephano, endowing the drunken mariner with a comic sort of ducal dignity.
There was general dissatisfaction, he was saying now, at the way these rehearsals were progressing. It was felt – he had felt it himself – that there had been a loss of direction. Apart from anything else, there were too many conflicting opinions, he would not say squabbles, about the way things should be done. He had began to fear – and he was not alone in this – that at this rate they would never arrive at the point of an actual performance. He felt responsible for the business because it had been his and Sarah’s idea in the first place as an entertainment for their father on his sixtieth birthday, and they were acting as hosts to the rest. In view of all this he had taken it upon himself to invite an acquaintance of one of his London cousins to come up and spend a few days as his guest and give the company the benefit of his advice. He trusted this would meet with general assent. It was a bid to save the enterprise, which otherwise was in danger either of breaking down in disorder or petering out altogether.
‘He is a London man,’ Charles said with utmost gravity. ‘He comes highly recommended. I understand from my cousin that he is a man of the theatre to his fingertips, a playwright and critic. He is a man fully qualified to oversee our efforts and give us the benefit of his counsel. Naturally a man of that calibre has demands upon him, but he has made the time for us. He has said that he can come; I expect him within the week.’
In short, they were to have a director.
SIXTEEN
When the Liverpool Merchant was three days out and rounding to clear the island of Anglesey, the weather thickened and squalls began to build up from the south-east. Through the night they grew in strength and by mid-morning of the next day it was blowing so hard that the trysail and topsails and later the foresail had to be handled and the boats lashed to the scuppers. The ship plunged under mainsail alone in a high, irregular sea.
These were dark hours for Paris. Feeling the disquiet of approaching seasickness, he took some powdered ginger-root as a preventive and afterwards went up for air. But the shriek of the wind in the rigging, the tilting deck, the unaccustomed difficulty of the footing and the rapid movements of the men as they worked to take in the topsails bewildered him. Despite the ginger, his anguish grew on him with dire speed. Clutching at the gunwale he vomited wildly to leeward in the dark and when the spasm was over went below. Here, on his narrow bunk, in the close confines of his cabin, he rolled and groaned with the shrieking ship, prey in the darkness to shuddering waves of nausea the like of which he had never known and which excluded all other sensations save a sort of feeble astonishment at his capacity for suffering. Long after all contents of the stomach had been voided, the miserable body kept up its writhing and retching until the thin