Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [96]
Yellow Henry’s smile disappeared and his face settled for some moments into lines of sullen savagery. ‘She one fine-fine slave,’ he said. ‘Worth fifty bar. She cotched together with de girl. Turns out she dat girl’s mudder.’
‘What is that to me?’ Thurso said. ‘She is not worth transporting. You can’t get any sort of price for a drop-breast woman. No, she goes back to shore. I’ll keep the girl, if she is sound.’
‘She sweet-sweet.’ Yellow Henry belched and began to smile again. ‘One more drams,’ he said, holding out his glass. ‘She sweet cunny, dat one. Look how she holding it. She not bambot ooman – nobody bin inside. Keep her han’ over it like a bird fly out.’ He rolled his bloodshot eyes roguishly. ‘Bird go fly in,’ he said.
The king’s bugler laughed loudly at this witticism and half raised his bugle as if to deliver a blast, then appeared to think better of it. ‘Whoosh!’ he laughed. ‘Bird fly in.’
Thurso had not smiled at the sally. ‘We go below now, look-see goods,’ he said. ‘We got plenty fine-fine thing. Yes, you can take some men with you but they’ll have to wait at the door, there’s no room inside. You had better come down with us,’ he said to Simmonds. ‘Barton stays up here with the doctor. Haines, stand by the brandy.’
They were below a considerable time, during which Paris, with his mentor always at his side, proceeded with the examination of the slaves. The last of the five men had a hard crust on the pinnae of the ears, a concretion oddly similar to the deposit Paris had known to form on the surface of the joints in cases of gout. There was also a tumour-like swelling in the groin which had broken at the surface to excrete a gum-like substance. ‘Do you see that, Barton?’ he said. ‘See how hard it is along the edges – it has made a kind of rim round the ulcer.’ In the interest of this, he forgot for a moment where he was, what he was doing. ‘The wound is like a crater,’ he said. ‘I have read of this somewhere.’ He began a careful palpation of the arms and legs, the short and thickset negro submitting with a sort of exhausted docility. Close to the surface, quite distinct to the touch, he found a number of small, tumour-like swellings. Beneath the dark skin he could discern a reddish colouring around them.
‘Been eatin’ dirt, ain’t you?’ Barton looked bored. ‘They eats dirt,’ he said.
Paris took off his hat at last and felt a reviving breeze on his head. ‘Nothing to do with what he has eaten,’ he said sharply. ‘This man has yaws. I have never seen a case before but I remember now to have read of it in Jacobus Bontius, in his book on diseases attending the negroes. He describes exactly this raspberry colouring of the tubercles and the hard bony edges of the ulcerations.’ Paris broke off. His voice had begun to sound strange in his ears, at once remote and insistent, as if he were reciting in an echoing room. He looked briefly down at his hat. On a sudden violent impulse, inexplicable to himself at the time and terribly startling to the diseased negro before him, he took it by the brim and pitched it like a quoit with all the strength of his arm clear over the side, where it went skimming with a long and graceful trajectory into the sea. ‘Unfortunately,’ he continued with unmoved countenance and quickened breath, ‘there is some confusion in Bontius’s treatise, as he uses the same word to describe the papules of yaws and those of syphilis, whereas as far as is presently known yaws is not necessarily transmitted by sexual intercourse, but by direct contact at the infectious –’
Glancing round, he found himself an object of general scrutiny. Even the slaves had raised their eyes to follow the bird-like skim of his hat. Barton was looking at him with an expression of particular attention. ‘I would need to keep this man under observation,’ Paris said.
‘Under observation?’ the