Sacred Hunger

Not too much to ask, is it? It was in 1935 when Allen Lane, Managing Director of Bodley Head Publishers, stood on a platform at Exeter railway station looking for something good to read on his journey back to London. His choice was limited to popular magazines and poor-quality paperbacks – the same choice faced every day by the vast majority of readers, few of whom could afford hardbacks. Lane’s disappointment and subsequent anger at the range of books generally available led him to found a company – and change the world.

We believed in the existence in this country of a vast reading public for intelligent books at a low price, and staked everything on it’
Sir Allen Lane, 1902–1970, founder of Penguin Books

The quality paperback had arrived – and not just in bookshops. Lane was adamant that his Penguins should appear in chain stores and tobacconists, and should cost no more than a packet of cigarettes.

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Prologue

Book One 1752–1753

Part One

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Part Two

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Part Three

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Part Four

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Part Five

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Part Six

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Part Seven

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Book Two 1765

Part Eight

Thirty-Seven

Thirty-Eight

Thirty-Nine

Forty

Forty-One

Forty-Two

Forty-Three

Forty-Four

Forty-Five

Part Nine

Forty-Six

Forty-Seven

Forty-Eight

Forty-Nine

Fifty

Fifty-One

Fifty-Two

Fifty-Three

Fifty-Four

Fifty-Five

Epilogue

This evening no different from others. He knows where he is by the quality of the light, the shape of the pale sheet of mirror behind the bar. Waterside bar, early evening sunlight falling through the open door – there are no windows. The light is broken, disturbed by movements of bodies. The interior of the bar is dark, he can see nothing there – he always sits facing the light. Between himself and the door shapes loom and melt. He knows that he is a licensed clown for the sailors, dockers, whores, who use this place. He knows that he is alone.

The drink he pays for himself, as long as he can, from the day’s yield of dimes, hoarding the coins together on the counter. When he runs out of money he might start to sing, snatch of some old slave song, in a high, cracked voice. Frail eyelids over ruined eyes, head trembling a little, yearning towards the light. The Paradise Nigger is dying, but he never looks any different; no more damage can show on his face.

He talks to anyone that he senses to be close; or to no one. Sometimes one of the customers will set him off, winking round at the others: ‘Come on, old Sawdust, what’s the news from paradise?’

‘Cause you ain’t seen it you don’t believe. Doubtin’ Thomas had to see the Lord wounds. But this nigger seen it. An’ they makes bellerin’ sounds an’ blow up water an’ got birds live inside they mouth, eat the pickin’s of they teeth, that’s ’nough food fo’ them birds, don’ need nuthin more. No sir! Dragon flies you heerd tell of. Please inform this nigger if you ain’t never heerd tell of dragon flies. Well, these dragon birds.’

He pauses for a moment, then says with sudden scorn, ‘I hear you laughin’. Yeah, you pissin’ youselves.’

‘You keep civil or I got to show you the door,’ the barkeeper says.

The mulatto lowers his head, an old reflex of submission. ‘Heart’s delight,’ he says, somewhere between a groan and a sigh. Some accidental gleam falls on the whitish sheaths of his eyes. He talks on, but to himself now, about the birds in the dragon’s mouth, and with rum they grow increasingly marvellous. Other birds too, white herons rising on slow wings, black snake-birds, and a sea of grass brimming and winking with flood-water. ‘Red-colour fish in them pool,’ he says, ‘an’ leather-shell turtle. I kin see it now. It never snowed nor frosted neether. I kin see the clouds, kinda like mist but then blue back of it. We come off a ship. That place nobody boss man. All the people live together friendly, say good-mornin’, good-evenin’, white or black don’ make no diff’rence …’

Someone puts a drink in his hand and he drinks and goes on talking, muttering, after they have stopped listening, when no one could have heard anyway because of the noise in the place, voices or music of a fiddle, he chokes himself up with a sudden crazy spasm of laughter, soft choking laughter that seizes his throat. ‘My poppa tell me dat, one time. He show me in a book. Long time ago now.’ Sparse tears run from his eyes. His mind fills with hyperbole, visions fed with hunger and rum, glowing moons, gilded palmettos, clouds pierced with splinters of sunshine. And faces, black and white, belonging to the time of the dragons. ‘I allus thought I goin’ to git back but I never did. You ain’t never goin’ now, nigger. Ah, Jesus.’

Sometimes, with the rum, he would get dogged about something, quarrelsome even. Or he would get tearful and wild. One way or another he would be thrown out sooner or later. This evening it is stray words of a woman heard earlier that get inflamed in his mind.

‘Why you say that? I warn’t born on no plantation. I ain’t a Guinea nigger neether. ’Cause I yaller, don’ mean my fadder a slave-driver neether. My fadder a doctor. I born in a paradise place. You hear me? You hear me there?’

He is put out into the alley; not very roughly, but he falls, allows himself to fall, to break the hold on his arm. So he sprawls there in the dark, the harmonica dangling round his neck, while his rage fades and his mind grows blank as his eyes. Some time later, on this particular evening, he limps and fumbles his way to the kitchen of the Cupola, where Big Suzanne presides.

Indigo evening of summer, he sees stars floating and dilating in it. Big red pansies bloom and die on Suzanne’s vast hips as she moves below the lamp. Standing unsteady in the doorway, he confides in her massive and contemptuous kindness.

‘I give them a piece of my mind.’

‘Sure,’ she says. ‘Same as every night. You been rollin’ around again, ain’t you? They’s some meat gravy if you wants it.’

‘We come on a ship,’ he says. ‘Not here.’

‘Don’t I know it? Here, take some of this here biscuit, mop it up with.’

‘Heart’s delight,’ he sighs, standing in the doorway with his plate.

Her sweating face smiles over at him. ‘That a fine name for a ship.’

Prologue

According to Charles Townsend Mather, the mulatto was dark amber in colour and grey-haired and nearly blind. He was small-boned and delicately made and he had a way of tilting his head up when he spoke, as if seeking to admit more light to the curdled crystals of his eyes. He was an old plantation slave from Carolina, freed when he was past work and turned off the land. In the spring and summer of 1832 he was begging every day in the streets of New Orleans and down on the waterfront. He would wait on the quayside for paid-off sailors, to whom some clouded impulse of pity or contempt might come. He was a talker; whether there was anyone to hear or not, he went on muttering or shouting the details of his life.

His slave name was Luther, then Sawdust was added, because an overseer made him eat sawdust once to discourage him from answering back – it seemed he had always been a talker. So Luther Sawdust. But in the bars along the waterfront he was known as the Paradise Nigger. He lived on scraps and spent what he had in the bars, where he was suffered for his gifts as an entertainer, until he got too drunk. People bought rum for him; he became something of an institution. He would sometimes play a tune on an old harmonica that he wore slung round his neck, or sing a song of the plantations. But mainly he talked – of a Liverpool ship, of a white father who had been doctor aboard her and had never died, a childhood of wonders in a place of eternal sunshine, jungle hummocks, great flocks of white birds rising from flooded savannahs, a settlement where white and black lived together in perfect accord. He claimed he could read. Also – and Mather vouches for this – he quoted snatches from the poetry of Alexander Pope. In one of his occasional pieces for the Mississippi Recorder Mather declares that he actually heard him do it. These pieces were afterwards collected and published privately under the title Sketches of Old Louisiana. The only record of the Paradise Nigger that we have is contained in this little-known work, in the chapter entitled ‘Colourful Characters of the Waterfront’. Mather says that when he returned to New Orleans after an absence of a year or so he found the mulatto gone and no one able to say what had become of him.

Continued observation of colourful characters took Mather frequently down cellar steps and he became in the course of time a colourful and visionary character himself, dying at last in a state of delirium in a Jacksonville sanatorium in 1841. His widow, preparing his papers for a collected edition, conceived it her duty to suppress the low-life material, and so the mulatto beggar was discarded, along with Big Suzanne and a transvestite guitarist named Angelo and a number of others.

Not exactly scrapped, but he was cast into the margin, into that limbo of doubtful existence where he lurks still, begging, boasting, talking about paradise, somewhere between Mather’s two trips to New Orleans, the two editions of his book. Can Mather have invented him? But this author grew lurid and disordered only in his latter days; the mulatto belongs to a cooler time. Besides, there are the quotations. I don’t believe Mather would have invented a thing like that. The mulatto invented himself – it was why he was tolerated in the bars. Some aura of my own invention lies about him too. The kneading of memory makes the dough of fiction, which, as we know, can go on yeasting for ever; and I have had to rely on memory, since the newspaper itself has been long defunct and its files have been destroyed or simply mouldered away. My own copy of the Sketches was lost years ago and I have never been able to unearth another or even to trace any reference to the work.

But the mulatto haunts my imagination still, with his talk of a lost paradise, raising his blind face to solicit something from me. Nothing can restore him now to Mather’s text, but he sits at the entrance to the labyrinth of mine …

One

The ship he meant was the Liverpool Merchant, Captain Saul Thurso, and he had never seen her, though she carried the seeds of all his dreams in her hold.

She carried death for the cotton broker who owned her, or so at least his son believed. For Erasmus Kemp it was always to seem that the ship had killed his father, and the thought poisoned his memories. Grief works its own perversions and betrayals: the shape of what we have lost is as subject to corruption as the mortal body, and Erasmus could never afterwards escape the idea that his father had been scenting his own death that drab afternoon in the timber yard on the banks of the Mersey when, amid colours of mud and saffron, he had lowered himself rather awkwardly down to sniff at the newly cut sections of mast for his ship. Not odours of embalmment, nothing sacramental; the reek of his own death.

It was an ugly thought, confirmed somehow by other remembered details, though naturally only Erasmus himself, as host to it, could have found these admissible as evidence: smell of wet sawdust and trodden mud – the mud was flecked with sawdust; cold swamp smell of the river only some hundred yards off; another odour too, stink of neglect, not really belonging here, transferred from another day by the same ugly workings of grief.

The sections of the mast were pale yellow; they lay in trestles under the rough plank roof – the shed was open at the sides. It had been raining heavily and the men had made a causeway of wood blocks down the churned slope of the bank. Erasmus had felt embarrassed at the theatrical way his father had brought his face so close up to snuffle at the raw wood. At twenty-one he was reticent, not given to gestures, moreover just then in a state of inflamed sensitivity, being in the early phase of his undeclared love for Sarah Wolpert.

‘Prime quality.’ Kemp straightened himself for the pronouncement. ‘When this tree was cut it was drinking sweetly. You can smell it in the sap. If you want to test the soundness of the timber, smell the sapwood. Isn’t that right, lads?’ He had made himself an expert on timber too.

It was imported fir from the Baltic. ‘Fir for a mast,’ Kemp said. ‘Fir is one thing breeds better out of England. By God, there are not many.’

Those round him laughed. They all knew him. They had seen him about the yards, with his quick movements, darkly flushed face, something careless in his dress without being slovenly, the short unpowdered wig, the long, square-cut outer coat usually hanging open.

‘See, my boy,’ he said to the aloof Erasmus. ‘Come over here and see. The pieces are all cut and ready. Here are the two parts of the spindle. D’you mark the taper on them? They’ll be coaked together in the middle here, and bolted after. Look at these woundy great fellows, d’you know what they are? See the thickness of them.’

His accent was still that of the rural Lancashire he had left as a child but warmer and more precipitate than is common there. He explained to his son how the spindle would be assembled and the massive side-trees jointed round it, how the mast would be thickened athwartships and fore and aft with heels of plank, then further secured by great iron hoops driven on the outside. And the mast was braced stronger in his mind with every word he spoke, every mark of assent from those around him, and his ship made proof against the violence of men and weather, ensuring a speedy passage and a good return on his outlay – and only Kemp could know how desperately this was needed.

Not knowing, Erasmus was bored and ill at ease – he had no natural friendliness towards inferiors as his father had. Remorse for the boredom would come too, in its season, and even for the ignorance, his failure to understand this striving to make the ship indestructible.

The signs were there for anyone to see. Kemp was a busy man but he would find occasion several times a week to ride down from his house in the town or his place of business near the Old Pool Dock to spend some time in Dickson’s Yard on the river bank, where his ship was being built, poking about, chatting to the shipwrights. Wealth had not dimmed his need to be liked, his desire to appear knowledgeable; and for a man who had come from nothing it was a gratifying thing to command this labour, to see the flanks of his ship swell on the stocks from day to day as by the patient breath of a god.

Not that there was much unusual about her. Ships had not changed significantly for a long time now. They were still built of wood, still powered by the action of the wind on sails of flax canvas attached to masts and yards supported by hemp rigging. Columbus, set down on any vessel of the time, would not have found much to puzzle him. All the same, these Liverpool ships had some special features: they were built high in the stern so that the swivel guns mounted on their quarterdecks could be the more easily, the more commodiously as might have been said then – a word curiously typical of the age – trained down on their waists to quell slave revolt; they had a good width of beam and a good depth of hold and they were thickened at the rails to make death leaps more difficult.

Nothing very special then about the Liverpool Merchant. Her purpose was visible from the beginning, almost, of her construction, in the shape of her keel, the gaunt ribs of her hull: a Liverpool snow, two-masted, brig-rigged, destined for the Atlantic trade. But Kemp’s natural optimism had been inflamed to superstition by the mounting pressure of his debts, and his hope in the ship was more than commercial.

He was a sanguine, handsome man, dark-complexioned, with straight brows and bright, wide-open black eyes and a habit of eager gesture that was something of a joke among his generally more stolid acquaintance – a limited joke, because Kemp, at least so far as anyone then knew, was successful in his enterprises and rich, with a wealth he was not reluctant to display: fine stone house in Red Cross Street among the principal merchants of the town; his own carriage with a liveried groom; a wife expensively turned out, though languid-looking – the positive, quick-mannered father and the glowering son together seemed to have drained her.

Father and son looked at each other now, standing beside the still-bleeding mast-pieces in the great draughty shed, divided in their sense of the occasion but with the same handsome brows and dark eyes, wide-open, bright, somehow dazed-looking, showing the same capacity for excess. ‘A thousand oaks to make this ship of mine,’ Kemp said, with satisfaction. ‘D’you know how to tell if the heart of an oak is sound? Veins of dried pith in it, that’s the danger sign, means the wood is rotten. That’s what you look for. Ask these fellows, they know. Pity you can’t do the same with people, eh, lads?’

He was attractive, even in his condescension; there was something magnetic about him. But not all filings will fly the same way, and the visit to the sailmaker’s loft was less successful. Erasmus could never remember how long afterwards this was, or indeed whether it was afterwards at all – his memories of those days had no ordered sequence. But he remembered feeling over-exposed here, in the large square loft brimming with light from its long windows, water-light thrown up from the grey river, austere and abundant, falling without distinction on faces and hands, on the dusty planks of the floor, the low benches, the tarred post in the centre with its rope and tackle for hanging the sails. A horizontal bar came out from this, with a square of thin sail-cloth draped over it.

There were three men on stools, with canvas spread over their knees, two journeymen and the sailmaker, a pale sparse-haired man. It was to him that Kemp spoke, with that warmth of manner that came naturally to him.

‘Well, my friend, and how is the work proceeding?’

The two others had risen at the merchant’s entrance, clutching the work in their laps; but he gave only a single glance upwards, then resumed his stitching. ‘Well enough, as the times are,’ he said.

Erasmus had noted the failure to rise, the absence of respectful title, the implicit complaint. This was some radical, atheist fellow – the yards were full of them. ‘See to your sails, you were best,’ he said. ‘Let those that are fitted for office see to the times.’

The man made no reply. He was stitching the edge of the sail with an extra layer of canvas, using a small iron hook with a cord spliced in it to confine the sail while he worked.

‘Let us leave this fellow to his stitching,’ Erasmus said to his father.

Kemp, however, was not yet deterred. ‘I trust you are making stout sails for my ship?’

‘It is the best hemp flax,’ the sailmaker said, barely pausing in his work.

After a moment or two, as if baffled slightly, Kemp turned to his son. ‘These sails, now,’ he said, with a conscious energy of tone, ‘they cut them out cloth by cloth, the width and depth down to a fraction, depending on the mast or yard they hang from. You need a devilish good eye for it, I can tell you. Ill-made sails will bring a ship to grief, however stout she is else. This fellow now is lining round the edges of the sail to –’

‘Not all the way round.’ The man still kept his head obstinately lowered. ‘Only at the leeches we have the lining.’

‘ ’Twas that I meant to say.’ Kemp spoke sharply – he had not liked being interrupted.

Nothing changed in the sailmaker’s expression but he paused in his stitching. ‘Was it so?’ he said. ‘Aye, the leeches, and some would say the bunts also. There are those as will line you all the middle parts of the foot of square sails and the foremost leech of staysails. I don’t know if you hold with that, sir?’

‘No.’ Kemp’s face had darkened, but he could never admit ignorance – it was like a defeat. ‘I take my stand on common practice,’ he said.

‘Practice is various, sir. What do you think should be done in the matter of the goring cloths, if I might be so bold?’

Erasmus felt himself flush with rage at this sly pedant who was contriving to discomfit his father. His loved father too he blamed, for persisting. This fellow should not be talked to, but quitted instantly – or kicked off his stool. He moved away to a window and stood with his back to the room, looking out across the faintly glimmering, slate-grey water of the Mersey at the masts of ships at anchor in the Pool. Gulls were wheeling overhead. Their plumage looked leaden against the dull sky and they seemed to hurtle like lead through the air. This coincidence, the justness of his observation, impressed Erasmus and took away his rage. He resolved to write it down later. His love had inclined him, not to poetry exactly, but to a sort of doom-laden note-taking. She is there now, he thought. Less than five miles from where I am standing.

Since falling in love with Sarah Wolpert, his being had become tidal, he could brim with her at any time, the channels were there already, the tracks his obsession had so quickly made. A twitch of recollection, a pang of sense, and the tide of her perfections would come flooding in, the clear pallor of her skin, the slight motions of her hands, the look of her eyelids when she glanced down, the imagined life of her body inside the hooped dress …

He had known her most of his life; their fathers were old acquaintances who had sometimes done business together; but real knowledge dated only from ten days before, from the occasion of her elder brother’s coming of age – Charles was a few months younger than himself. He had gone rather unwillingly, being always ill at ease in a crowd, disliking broken talk, shared place. He was farouche, intractable. But some grace descended on his eyes that night. He had thought her childish and affected until this descent of knowledge – knowledge she must surely have shared: she had given him some looks. But she had looked at others too …

Turning his mind from this he began with a sort of stricken patience to piece that evening together again, the lamplight, bare arms, inflections of voice, whispers of silk. Filigree of a miracle. Again his being flooded with her.

He kept his back to the room a while longer, hearing the voices continuing still. A daub of sunlight from some invisible rift in the cloud lay far out on the water. Below him the tide lapped, muddy and sullen. Here along the open bank were the yards where Liverpool’s ships were built, theirs among the others, not framed yet, not much more than the spine of her keel, yet to his eager father already freighted and on her way south. Erasmus felt a rush of surprised affection. He had none of this transfiguring enthusiasm. His need to possess the present was too urgent. Lately the sense of this difference between them had complicated his feelings with a kind of sorrow, though whether for himself or for his father he could not have said.

He turned back into the room, where silence had now fallen. Some accommodation had been reached – his father’s face was florid and calm. The sailmaker he did not look at. He saw the sheet of canvas over the bar stir and creep a little in some current of air. It is always through arbitrary combinations that experience enslaves the memory. New shackles were being forged here, in the light-filled loft, amid smells of oiled canvas and raw hemp and tar, the creeping fringes of the sail-cloth, his feelings for Sarah Wolpert and for his father.

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 voice, drink-thickened and truculent. Old Rolfson, who died of a stroke not long after, on the steps of the Exchange, leaving more than one hundred thousand pounds, most of it made provisioning the army during the recent wars.

‘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 was sometimes aware of it hanging in the air of conversations, in silences, in shifts of subject, too elusive for a cause of quarrel – he would have fought any man of whatever degree who spoke in disrespect of his father’s memory.

This evening he had not seen anything amiss. Drink had made his father eloquent, but there was nothing wrong in that. He had been proud of the way his father had stared that old ruffian Rolfson down, and dominated the table. He had thought him right in everything he said. It was true that the presence of Matthew Paris had been disturbing; it was hateful to have a jail-bird for a cousin and to be obliged to sit at table with him. But Erasmus had drunk quite a lot too; and something had happened earlier that day which occupied his thoughts and possibly blunted his observation. In the afternoon he had taken his courage in both hands and ridden over to the Wolpert house, ostensibly to see Charles. And there, without quite knowing how or why, he, who had always hated acting, had allowed himself to be enrolled in the cast of a play.

BARRY UNSWORTH

Sacred Hunger

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Contents

Epilogue

SACRED HUNGER

Prologue

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

One

Two