Billy Blair woke from stupor to find himself lying in fetid darkness in the hold of some old flat-bottomed hulk like a barge. She was moored in deep water – he could feel how she moved in her chains. His face was stiff with dried blood and his right eye gave him pain. Someone not far away was whimpering tearfully. ‘Wha’s that snufflin’?’ he said. Faint light came through the ill-fitting planks of the deck above and he heard sounds of movement there. ‘Got any grog up there, shipmate?’ he called up. ‘I am parched.’
Someone brought a face down close to the deckboards and spoke through: ‘You can have water.’
‘Water’s no bleddy use, man. My throat is on fire.’ He paused, casting round for further arguments. ‘The bastids have cooped us up down here,’ he said, with pathos.
After a moment or two longer the hatch was raised and he saw the tousled head of a man looking down at him. ‘You keep yer napper stowed below there and don’t try no tricks. I have been set over you till we gets aboard an’ I will do it. I ain’t riskin’ the bilboes for you, so you better not think of tryin’ to cut loose.’
‘Now there’s a friendly soul,’ Billy said. ‘All I am askin’, from yen Christian to another, is have you got any grog?’
There was a short silence and then to his delight Billy saw a bottle swinging down to him, tied with a cord round the neck. ‘God bless you,’ he said, grasping at it. ‘I will overlook them former threats. What’s yor name?’
‘Cavana,’ the man said. ‘The other one here with me is Hughes.’
‘I am Billy Blair.’ He took a drink from the bottle, felt the spirit take its fiery course down his throat. ‘Ah, by God,’ he sighed, ‘that’s better.’
The hatch was lowered, leaving him once again in darkness. A melancholy voice spoke from somewhere near him. ‘Give us a drop, Billy, for the love of God.’
‘Wha’s that?’
‘It’s me. Michael Sullivan.’
‘Sullivan! How the pox did you get here?’
‘Same way as you. They knocked me senses out of me an’ brung me over an’ threw me down in this floatin’ stink-hole.’ The voice paused a moment, then said with deepened sadness, ‘An’ me givin’ them no cause for offence at all.’
‘Were you whimperin’ an’ crying just now?’
‘No, I was not. I was lyin’ quiet here, thinkin’ of me troubles.’
‘Well,’ Billy said, ‘it serves you right. I am passin’ the bottle to you, because it is a charity, but I don’t know that I would choose to drink wi’ you in other circumstances, now that I see what you have come down to, playin’ the fiddle in a whorehouse an’ helpin’ to sell poor sailor lads.’ He saw a dark form raise itself in the dimness of the hold, made out the pallor of the face. He extended the bottle, felt it taken from him, heard Sullivan take a long swallow. ‘That is not work to be proud of, Michael,’ he said. ‘An’ just gan easy wi’ that bottle, will you? Here, let’s have it back.’
‘I was doin’ fine till you come on the scene,’ Sullivan said, in a stronger voice.
‘Now it’s my bleddy fault, is it?’
‘You had to come into that place, didn’t you? An’ just the time when I was in it. Sure, the divil directed your steps. That wasn’t the only place I played in an’ they wasn’t all whorehouses an’ snuffle-dens. If a man finds himself in bad company he keeps mum. That is a first rule an’ I broke it like a idjit. I could get a bite to eat an’ a dram an’ a place to lay me head an I could play me fiddle. Then you come in, full of piss an’ wind, an’ I remember you straight off because you always was full of piss an’ wind, you haven’t changed one iota, an’ I does my best to warn you but you are too drunk to understand anythin’ at all. Like a idjit I get in the way of the fightin’ and get knocked off me feet an’ end up here.’
‘Well,’ Billy said, after a pause for reflection, ‘I see how it was. You played the part of a friend to me an’ Billy Blair does not forget his friends. Here, I forgive you, have another pull at the bottle.’
‘You forgive me? Holy Mary, that’s rich.’
‘There is someone else here has a thirst,’ a quiet voice said from the darkness forward of them.
Raising himself on one elbow, Billy peered through the dark, made out a man sitting upright where the boat narrowed at the bows.
‘Wha’s that?’
‘The name is Deakin. I been pressed here, same as you.’
‘Pass him the bottle,’ Billy said, in a tone of resignation. ‘Was that you snufflin’ just now?’
‘No, there’s another feller here alongside of me.’
As if this were a signal, the whimpering began again. Deakin hesitated a moment, then reached out and touched the shoulder of the man lying near him pressed against the boat’s side. ‘Hold your noise,’ he said. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Dan’l Calley.’ The voice came choked with mucus and tears. ‘I don’t want to stay here.’
‘Be jabers,’ Sullivan said in a tone of affected surprise. ‘You up there!’ he called out. ‘There’s a man here says he doesn’t want to stay. I think he should see the capting.’
A different voice answered this time, harsher, more violent than the first. ‘Damn you, stow your gab. There’s no more rum. You get a bucket of bilge-water if you don’t keep quiet.’
Deakin kept his hand on the man’s shoulder a few moments longer. The choked voice had touched something in him. He had heard men cry for pain before; and he had stood at the guns, on decks strewn with bodies and running with blood, and wept with exhaustion; but he had never heard a grown man whimper with misery like this. Now, in his despair, it was as if he heard his own tears of the past, heard his own voice in the dark nights of long ago and found a comforter. ‘Keep your spirits up, Dan’l,’ he said. ‘Be a man. There’s nothing to do but wait for the morning.’
‘Aye,’ Billy said, ‘a man has to look on the bright side. I got a few drams an’ a plate o’ meat pies before that screw took off wi’ my purse. I wish I could of fucked her an’ all,’ he added wistfully.
‘You will lose more than that again,’ Sullivan said. ‘Whativer they have give the landlord for us comes out of our wages, mebbe two guineas apiece.’
‘God will find out that fat buggeranto of a landlord. An’ in case not I will find him out when I get back an’ I will slit him up the nose. Here, lads, let’s have the bottle back this end.’
‘Don’t you be mentioning God to me. I stopped believin’ in him years ago, but now I am goin’ to give him up for good. He has shipped me on a slaver only for tryin’ to stand up for a shipmate.’
‘Aye, that’s right.’ Gloom descended on Billy. ‘Took for the Africa trade,’ he said bitterly. ‘An’ looka that, there’s nowt left in the bottle. Them fellers down there have supped it all up.’
After a long silence, during which Billy thought Sullivan had fallen asleep, the mournful voice came out of the darkness. ‘I hope me fiddle is all right. If they have broke it, I will have the law of them, sure as me name’s Michael Sullivan.’
‘Law of them, you daft bumbo? They have threw you down here, they are goin’ to send you chasin’ quashees up an’ down all the pox-ridden rivers on the Guinea Coast, an’ you talk about gettin’ the law of them for the sake of your bleddy fiddle.’
‘I see well that you know nothin’ at all about the law,’ Sullivan said. ‘Me fiddle is property. It comes under a different headin’.’
Sitting above in the ramshackle shelter they had built aft of the hatchway, with Cavana asleep beside him, Hughes heard the voices below and the silence that surrounded the voices and both sound and silence were of the same quality to him and had the same degree of meaning. The sky was clearing now, after the rain, and the wind was veering south-west and freshening – he could hear the strengthening slap of the wash against the buoy to which the hulk was moored. While the wind stayed in that quarter they would not clear the river.
He sat hunched against the chill, his cloak over his shoulders. He did not like the proximity of Cavana, breathing heavily beside him. But there was no other shelter on the hulk. Human beings too close constricted him to the point of violence sometimes – on board ship he never slept below except in the worst of weathers. Neither did he like the job of guarding pressed men, it made for bad blood at sea, but he had been detailed for it and had no intention of getting a flogging for their sake, so he kept awake; men determined enough might start the hatch or the rotten planking of her sides, and try to swim for it.
He was impatient for the sea again. At forty-three, Hughes was a stranger on land. Brief, violent debauches at her dirty edges was all in twenty-five years he had known of her. When there was nothing left to spend there was no reason for being ashore. Penniless, light-headed with drink and venery, Hughes signed for the first ship he could get, so long as she was an ocean-going vessel. That this one was a slaveship made little difference – he had been on slaveships before.
He looked towards her now, where she lay out in the road. He could make out her deck lamps, their lights softened and diffused by the vaporous air surrounding her; she was enveloped in the mist of her own breath. She was a new-built ship and her timbers were breathing – Hughes knew this well enough. New timber would always steam on a cool night. But there are different sorts of knowledge and he had no doubt either that the Liverpool Merchant was panting for the open sea.