Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [5]
TWO
Then there was the supper party, his father’s visionary gleam in the firelight, candle-light, face darkly flushed below the ash-grey line of his wig, heated with talking and wine. Not the same man at all as that sniffer of timbers, the bluffer in the sailmaker’s loft. One of those in receipt of his father’s eloquence that evening was his cousin, Matthew Paris. It was his cousin’s arrival, the looming quality of his presence there, a man newly released from prison – though of course the other guests knew nothing of this – that fixed the evening so clearly in Erasmus’s mind. He had hated his cousin from the age of ten, because of an incident on a beach in Norfolk. Paris was to be the ship’s surgeon.
The ladies had left the table, headed by his mother, who was always prompt to rise, as far as her habitual languidness could show it, to escape from the oppression of loud male voices and spirituous breath.
The voices grew louder with the ladies gone. Light played over the long, beast-footed sideboard, flickered on the heavy brass clasps that held its doors, on glasses and decanter, on the triple-headed silver candlesticks that had belonged to his mother’s mother. These, and the gilded mahogany clock above the fireplace and the ebony book-ends carved as ravens holding the big Bible with its purple silk marker, were things he had grown up with, as was his father’s voice, which had never to his recollection sounded the faintest note of doubt or misgiving.
It was confident as ever now, while the two different sorts of flame, ruddy and pale in concert, danced assent to his views of the profits to be made in the Africa trade, the voice warm, insistent, with sudden rising inflections, telling his guests assembled there that this very time, this year of grace 1752, was the best, the most auspicious possible: ‘Now that the wars are over, now that the Royal African Company has lost its charter and the monopoly that went with it, now that we can trade to Africa without paying dues to those damned rogues in London …’
Paris there among the others, silent – he hardly spoke at all; but more physically present than anyone else, solid among shadows, with his big-knuckled hands and awkward bulk and long pale face and the aura of shame and disgrace he brought with him.
‘The trade is wide open. Wide open, I tell you, gentlemen. The colonies grow more populous by the year, by the month. The more land that is planted, the more they will want negroes. It is a case of first come, first served. And who is best placed to take it on? London is away there on the wrong side, with the Thames up her arse. Bristol’s costs are twice ours here. I tell you, if God picked this town up in the palm of his hand and studied where best in England to set her down for the Africa trade, he would put her exactly back where she is, exactly where she stands at present.’
He thumped his fist on the table so that the glasses rattled and sat looking round the faces, challenging contradiction.
‘Why should God want to do Liverpool a kindness?’
The source of this levity Erasmus could not afterwards remember, but he remembered the frown of displeasure that came to his father’s face.
‘It was a manner of speaking,’ Kemp said. ‘I am not the man to take God’s name in vain.’ Though profane by thoughtless habit, he was a church-going man and devout, especially now, with his ship on the stocks and his thoughts on the hazardous business of capturing and selling negroes. God is polycephalous, as the diversity of our prayers attests; his aspect varies with men’s particular hopes, and Kemp’s were pinned on fair winds and good prices. ‘I tell you,’ he said, ‘sure as I sit here, the future of Liverpool lies with the Africa trade. It is patent and obvious to the meanest understanding. The trade goods are all in our own backyard, the cottons, the trinkets, the muskets, everything we –’
‘For my part, I’ll stick to what I know.’ An old man’s