The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,35

wondering whether he should attempt a reply to the effect that the threat of flogging would have been of no avail if the crew had been united in opposition, when another voice was raised. “Beggin’ your pardon, sir, I was in the galley, I did not come out on deck till hearin’ Mr. Paris call out an’ then the pistol shot that came after.”

“That is Morgan, sir, the ship’s cook,” Barber said. “It is true that he was in the galley at the time, we can all swear to that.”

“Will you go on with your account?”

“The slaves was dyin’ in numbers, sir, both the men and the women. There was the bloody flux among them, an’ it was gainin’ ground day by—”

“What is that?”

“It is when they passes blood, beggin’ your pardon. What they eat is turned to blood inside of them, they passes it with their excrements an’ they gets weaker an’ dies from one day to the next. The ship run into squally weather, we had to fasten down the hatches on them, they had no air, sir. On that mornin’ we are talkin’ of, when we opened the hatches we found twelve dead, countin’ men, women and boys. I remember well the figure because it was what Thurso began by tellin’ us. He called us to a meetin’, you see, sir, the ship’s officers that was left.”

Hughes let the words wash over him without paying much heed to the meaning. It was an old story; too much had happened since. He looked up to the strip of sky above him. It was blue, hazed with the smoke of the city. With what seemed something more than an accident of timing, pigeons flew across that narrow space as he looked up, glinting in the sun, birds of silver. Even amid the stench of his person and that of his shipmates, even in the misery and filth of this place, he seemed to sense the burgeoning of spring. He scanned the wall across from where he was standing. Sixteen, eighteen feet. There were cracks in the brickwork and small hollows where the mortar had crumbled from the joints. Given time, given a bit of luck … He did not really believe it; he was old now, nearly fifty, his muscles had stiffened in prison; a bad fall, and he could cripple himself. On crutches to the hangman …

He had always been a climber, always first in the tops. In the dark misanthropy of his nature he had found joy in sleeping away from the others, slung high aloft, swaying in his sleep with the sway of the ship. In the years of the settlement too he had kept apart, always happiest at a distance from his fellows, making platforms up in the trees where he could hide away. Suddenly now, in the midst of the voices, a memory came to him. He had been high up in a jungle cluster, overlooking a freshwater pool. The white-tailed deer came to drink there; bow and arrows on the platform beside him, he had been waiting to see them come stepping through the trees. If you chose the right moment, when the deer lowered its head to drink, you could break its neck with a single bolt. Waiting there in solitude—it was one of his last memories of happiness. And it had been then, in those moments, that he had looked seaward and seen the schooner, wondered why it dallied there at anchor, not knowing that aboard her was a man named Erasmus Kemp, who had come to destroy them.

This was the man who had taken him and set him here in this hateful, choking closeness to others, a closeness there was no escaping, that had brought out a spirit of murder in him—not against his mates, who were caged and helpless as he was, but against those outside, those who had done this to him, who still lived in freedom.

“He put it to us fair and square,” Barber said. “There was the bosun an’ the first mate an’ the cooper, Davies, an’ me. We was all the officers what was left, d’ye see, sir?”

“Not the doctor?”

“No, sir, Mr. Paris was laid up with a fever. Well, he was comin’ out of it, but he was keepin’ to his quarters below. I think we all knowed that was why Thurso called the meeting when he did.”

“What do you mean?”

“Them two never got on. Thurso didn’t want no argument, he never liked anyone