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By Root 1616 0

against the sun-darkened skin. Neat and quick in his own movements, Deakin had noticed from the first the surgeon’s ungainliness of posture and movement. He seemed not fully at ease with his own body now, as he stood there in the full-sleeved white shirt and dark breeches. ‘When I was younger,’ Deakin said steadily, ‘when I was first going to sea, I made a voyage on a slaveship. The negroes rose on us while we lay at Calabar with the crew all drunk. They knocked the brains out of the first mate and two of the men on watch. We had to kill twenty-three before we could get them below. They all but took the ship.’ He was silent for some moments, then he jerked his head towards his companion. ‘Dan’l has never been on any kind of ship before,’ he said.

‘He is learning well,’ Paris said. He had noticed Calley’s devoted application to the ropes.

Calley was flustered at being so suddenly the centre of attention. This man expected something of him and so did his admired Deakin. ‘I used to work in the market,’ he said. ‘Porterin’. You gets a saddle to put on.’ He looked with a mirthful expression at Paris.

‘You have to harden your heart against them or you cannot do it,’ Deakin said. He was still struggling with Paris’s question. ‘A man doesn’t expect to like things,’ he added, half to himself.

‘At all events,’ Paris said, ‘here you are.’

‘Yes, here I am. Dan’l and me must get on, sir. We are wanted to lend a hand with the longboat. You see, they have heard us.’ He gestured towards the land.

In some indeterminate zone between the bright surf and the wall of forest Paris saw pale feathers of smoke rising. They uncurled slowly in the milk-blue haze.

‘That is their fires, is it?’ He watched with some fascination these thinning puffs from a hidden continent. No human agency was evident. It was like some breeding of vapours out there, where the spray made the atmosphere vague.

Haines, the boatswain, came quickly towards them. ‘What are you doing here?’ he said fiercely to Deakin and Calley. ‘How long does it take you to wring out a few swabs? You pair of lazy sons of whores, wasn’t you ordered aft to lend a hand with the boat?’

‘I detained them in talk,’ Paris said quickly. There had been insolence towards himself in this violent incursion – Haines had addressed the men without a glance in his direction. ‘Do you hear me, Haines? I say it was I who kept them there.’ He encountered the glittering, close-set eyes of the boatswain and caught the slightly rank odour of the oil he used on his abundant ringlets. Haines was wearing a sleeveless calico waistcoat and the muscles at his shoulders and arms flexed smoothly as he struck lightly with the side of a hand against the gunwale. There was a constant bitter energy about him, as if – or so it seemed to Paris – the boatswain was recharged by the abuse and blows he distributed.

‘Talking is for below, not for men on deck,’ he said. ‘There is work still to be done, Doctor. We shall have visitors before long, judging by the smoke they are sending up.’

‘I know it. I was only intending to say that it was my doing that these two were delayed.’

With the barest of nods, Haines turned away and went aft again, to where the longboat was hoisted out between the fore- and mainmasts. Cavana and Sullivan were packing oakum into her seams and ramming the yarns home as close as they could with fingers and short chisels, Wilson following behind with mallet and spike to drive the wadding in tighter. McGann was tending a small iron brazier, which stood alongside on the deck with a cauldron of steaming pitch on it. The air above the brazier rippled with heat and the flat, muffled blows of the mallet echoed over the ship.

With Haines’s eye upon them they worked in silence, but he was summoned by the captain after some minutes. On the strength of the signal fires and the absence for the moment of rival traders, Thurso had decided to moor with the sheet anchor and stay some time here.

Sullivan straightened himself up as soon as the boatswain had turned his back. ‘McGann has the best of it,’ he said without