Read Online Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Barry Unsworth
Ads: Link
The harsh aspiration came again as he sat there and again as he dismounted but with the first scrape of his steps it sounded no more. He saw the heap start against the wall, with a sudden movement almost violent. Then as he drew near, it was absolutely silent and still.
Matted hair obscured the face but he saw blood on it, still glistening fresh, and as he leaned closer he made out the puncture marks of small teeth: one side of the man’s face had been bitten at by rats while he lay helpless there. But it was not this that held Erasmus, rather a kind of puzzlement: why, at the first sound of steps, had he fallen so silent and still?
Erasmus leaned closer and looked into the man’s eyes. They were wide open, staring up at him or at the night beyond him and the awaited end the night contained.
And Erasmus knew himself in that moment for an intruder, knew this creature wanted him gone, was with the last energy of his life holding himself still against being touched, being moved. That recoil against the wall had been an attempt at concealment. He had crawled into this runnel as if dying were a sin he did not want to be caught at.
The stench of long neglect rose from his rags, a nauseous reek of old cold dirt and grease and excrement and fever. Erasmus felt his gorge rise. He turned away and went back to his horse, unaware yet, as he rode on, as he found his way eventually into wider, better-lit streets of shops and taverns and people, that he too had been violated in some narrow place where he had crawled. There are no stronger fetters than those we forge for ourselves. Because he had ridden away, because he might have been mistaken, Erasmus told no one of this encounter. It was never disinfected or treated in any way. The memory festered and in the course of time rotted its container and leaked into his father’s death and into the smell of the ship’s timbers.
8.
Work on the ship continued; she rose on her stocks from day to day, proceeding by ordained stages from notion to form. Like any work of the imagination, she had to maintain herself against disbelief, guard her purpose through metamorphoses that made her barely recognizable at times—indeed she had looked more herself in the early stages of the building, with the timbers of the keel laid in place and scarphed together to form her backbone and the stem and sternpost jointed to it. Then she had already the perfect dynamic of her shape, the perfect declaration of her purpose. But with the attachment of the vertical frames, which conform to the design of the hull and so define the shape of it, she looked a botched, dishevelled thing for a while, with the raw planks standing up loose all round her. Then slowly she was gripped into shape again, clamped together by the transverse beams running athwart her and the massive wales that girdled her fore and aft. She was riveted and fastened with oak trenails and wrought-iron bolts driven through the timbers and clenched. And so she began to look like herself again, as is the gradual way of art.
William Kemp was present at every stage.
Garrulity grew upon him. With his tricorn hat tilted back, his sober, expensive, negligently worn clothes, his short wig emphasizing the dark flush of his face, he held forth to the people of the yards, the shipwrights and their labourers, the fitters, the rope-makers—he would talk to anyone connected with the ship, down to the lad heating tar to calk her seams.
With business associates he was voluble about the opportunities just then afforded. There was no shortage of examples among their common acquaintance. Old Jonathan Horstmann who, as everyone knew, began as a tallow chandler in a back-street shop and bought a thirtieth share in one of the first slavers to sail out of Liverpool, had just died, leaving near a quarter of a million. Less than three years previously, the Wyatt family had fitted out four ships for the transport of twelve hundred negroes to the Caribbean. They had made
Matted hair obscured the face but he saw blood on it, still glistening fresh, and as he leaned closer he made out the puncture marks of small teeth: one side of the man’s face had been bitten at by rats while he lay helpless there. But it was not this that held Erasmus, rather a kind of puzzlement: why, at the first sound of steps, had he fallen so silent and still?
Erasmus leaned closer and looked into the man’s eyes. They were wide open, staring up at him or at the night beyond him and the awaited end the night contained.
And Erasmus knew himself in that moment for an intruder, knew this creature wanted him gone, was with the last energy of his life holding himself still against being touched, being moved. That recoil against the wall had been an attempt at concealment. He had crawled into this runnel as if dying were a sin he did not want to be caught at.
The stench of long neglect rose from his rags, a nauseous reek of old cold dirt and grease and excrement and fever. Erasmus felt his gorge rise. He turned away and went back to his horse, unaware yet, as he rode on, as he found his way eventually into wider, better-lit streets of shops and taverns and people, that he too had been violated in some narrow place where he had crawled. There are no stronger fetters than those we forge for ourselves. Because he had ridden away, because he might have been mistaken, Erasmus told no one of this encounter. It was never disinfected or treated in any way. The memory festered and in the course of time rotted its container and leaked into his father’s death and into the smell of the ship’s timbers.
8.
Work on the ship continued; she rose on her stocks from day to day, proceeding by ordained stages from notion to form. Like any work of the imagination, she had to maintain herself against disbelief, guard her purpose through metamorphoses that made her barely recognizable at times—indeed she had looked more herself in the early stages of the building, with the timbers of the keel laid in place and scarphed together to form her backbone and the stem and sternpost jointed to it. Then she had already the perfect dynamic of her shape, the perfect declaration of her purpose. But with the attachment of the vertical frames, which conform to the design of the hull and so define the shape of it, she looked a botched, dishevelled thing for a while, with the raw planks standing up loose all round her. Then slowly she was gripped into shape again, clamped together by the transverse beams running athwart her and the massive wales that girdled her fore and aft. She was riveted and fastened with oak trenails and wrought-iron bolts driven through the timbers and clenched. And so she began to look like herself again, as is the gradual way of art.
William Kemp was present at every stage.
Garrulity grew upon him. With his tricorn hat tilted back, his sober, expensive, negligently worn clothes, his short wig emphasizing the dark flush of his face, he held forth to the people of the yards, the shipwrights and their labourers, the fitters, the rope-makers—he would talk to anyone connected with the ship, down to the lad heating tar to calk her seams.
With business associates he was voluble about the opportunities just then afforded. There was no shortage of examples among their common acquaintance. Old Jonathan Horstmann who, as everyone knew, began as a tallow chandler in a back-street shop and bought a thirtieth share in one of the first slavers to sail out of Liverpool, had just died, leaving near a quarter of a million. Less than three years previously, the Wyatt family had fitted out four ships for the transport of twelve hundred negroes to the Caribbean. They had made
Similar Books
