Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [55]
‘Sick bay?’ Thurso glared up at his listless topsails for a moment. ‘Are you mad, Mr Paris? What need is there now for it when we have no sickness aboard?’
‘I intend to treat that man’s back,’ Paris said. ‘His lacerations could easily become putrid if not attended to.’
‘Wilson? God damn my blood,’ Thurso said violently. ‘I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at you. I have seen a hundred like him treated well enough with a handful of salt.’
Paris hesitated. He had not wanted to use his uncle’s name, but he was set on winning the day – and not for his own sake only. He said, ‘You compel me to remind you that Mr Kemp intended me to have the use of that room. He so stated and in your hearing.’
He saw that Thurso had clenched his right fist so that the knuckles whitened. At the sight, with a reciprocal impulse of violence he did not know he possessed, and which he was afterwards to think of as some infection of madness, he advanced his face and brought his hands to his sides. ‘I want that sick bay cleared, sir, if you please,’ he said.
‘Yes, I thought we should hear of your uncle before long.’ Thurso seemed about to say more, but suddenly his expression changed and he lifted his head. ‘There, can you hear it?’ he said.
‘Hear what?’
‘The wind, you fool.’
Listening now more intently, Paris heard a tune in the rigging that he did not think had been there before, and a moment later he felt a breeze against his face. There was a series of rippling sounds as the canvas began to fill out.
‘You can have your precious sick bay if it matters so much,’ Thurso said with contempt. He felt the wind increasing, felt the responsive gathering of the ship. It came again, stronger, singing through the ropes, a harmony of high-pitched tones, transmitted to the chains and thence through all the timbers. And it was coming from the west. ‘You see, it is answered,’ he said, turning away. ‘We have freed the wind.’
‘What do you mean?’
No answer came to this. The captain’s face had relaxed into lines of fatigue. He was looking down to the foot of the gangway, where drops of Wilson’s blood still glistened.
SEVENTEEN
Erasmus waited for an occasion when his father was in relaxed mood – occasions rarer these days than he had ever known them to be. He chose one evening after supper when his father, at ease in skull-cap and dressing-gown, was smoking a pipe or two in the small, oak-panelled sanctum he called his study.
‘Can you spare me some minutes, sir?’
Kemp, observing for a while in silence the military posture that his son had adopted, head up and shoulders braced back, was brought to mind of other occasions, going back to earliest childhood, when Erasmus had stood before him thus. Unexpectedly, and in the midst of his anxieties, he found himself visited by compassion for this self-willed son of his, for whom life had always been a succession of self-imposed tests and ordeals. Just in this way, he thought, Erasmus will bear himself at the news of my ruin, if it comes.
‘Yes, of course, my boy,’ he said. ‘What is it?’
‘I want to ask Sarah Wolpert to marry me,’ Erasmus said, looking straight before him. ‘That is, I want to ask her father …’ He stumbled a moment. ‘I want to ask for her hand. I wished to know if you had any objections to such a course, sir.’
‘Wolpert’s daughter?’ Kemp was taken aback. He had noticed an increased interest in clothes on his son’s part; the boy took longer over the dressing of his hair and the tying of his neck-cloth; but Erasmus had always been fastidious about his linen and careful of his appearance and was now at a foppish age. He knew his son had been going a good deal to the Wolpert house but there was the play to account for this and Wolpert had a boy only slightly younger than Erasmus.
‘I suspected nothing of it,’ he said. ‘I have been much preoccupied of late. Besides, you