Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [6]
‘And what may that be?’ somebody asked him. Jocular, not very friendly. ‘We have peace now, Isaac, your contracts are finished. Fortunately for our brave army. I make no doubt your victuals killed more of them than the French did.’
There was laughter at this, which the old man heard through with a sort of malevolent composure. He was making to speak again, but someone on his right got in first.
‘He means the Spanish trade, don’t you, Rolfson?’
‘A contraband trade?’ Kemp waxed scornful. ‘So you’d found this city’s fortune on smuggled tobacco? I am talking about a commerce that will be worth millions. A lawful commerce – it is sanctioned by the law of the land. Merchants trading to Africa can hold up their heads with the best.’
In later times, when commercial enterprise came to be a virtue in itself, and a good return on capital was blessing enough, the need to invoke legitimacy was not so much felt, but the men seated around this table still felt it strongly. Kemp had made his assertion with triumphant authority and it was greeted without demur. He waited a moment, then continued more quietly: ‘Those that get in now will be the ones best situated. I’d be surprised if there are more than twenty Liverpool ships in the trade at present. In the next ten years you’ll see that go up to a hundred. Why, my tailor is in it. He was telling me just the other day. He has bought a tenth part in a thirty-ton sloop that will carry you seventy-five negroes to the West Indies.’
‘That’s no more than a fishing-smack.’ Paris this, his one remembered contribution to the talk. The voice rather deep, vibrant, softened by the growling inflections of Norfolk. ‘Hardly longer than a pitch for quoits,’ he added after a moment. Incredulity in the tone, though what he was questioning – the size of the vessel, the number of negroes – Erasmus couldn’t determine.
His father, it seemed, had heard quite a different question. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘that is the beauty of it. Ten men can sail her. One prime slave will make you a profit of twenty-five pounds in Kingston market – enough to pay ten men’s wages for two months at sea.’
Kemp looked smiling round the table. ‘And look what is happening to sugar,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to tell you gentlemen what raw sugar is worth on the home market nowadays.’ He raised a hand and made a rapid sketch of a triangle in the air before him. ‘Three separate profits,’ he said. ‘One in Africa, one in Jamaica, one back here. And each one better than the last.’
With the exception of Paris, these were all Liverpool men. There could scarcely have been one of them who had not a full understanding of the Triangular Trade, as it was called – cheap trade goods to Africa for the purchase of negroes, these then carried to America or the West Indies and sold there; rum and tobacco and sugar bought with the proceeds and resold in England. Most of them were involved in the trade to some degree, as manufacturers, brokers or wholesalers.
Kemp was telling them what they already knew. He was aware himself that he was doing so. But he was in fear, and needed these days the temporary sedative of approval to take the edge off it, as one might need a drug, and he was ready to spend his best efforts to obtain this. There were those who afterwards recalled the garrulity that descended on Kemp towards the end of his life, and gave it out that they had always seen the weakness, known he was not sound by the way he sought to involve you in his purposes, get you on his side, working for it, casting round his energetic glances, gesturing with his hands like a confounded Frenchman. Kemp could not keep his own counsel, they said, and that will bring a man to ruin sooner or later.
These were people who added to their satisfaction at another’s downfall the gloss of worldly wisdom. In the period after his father’s death, Erasmus