Thurso had returned from his visit to the Edgar in late afternoon, in much improved mood, having learned from Captain Macdonald that trade was brisk further east along the coast and especially in the vicinity of the Kavalli River. Thurso was intending to do some business on his own account – business which no one but Barton knew anything about. The Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, to which his owner, William Kemp, belonged, had taken over the dilapidated old fort on the coast, previously the property of the Royal Africa Company, and refurbished it, installing new cannon, strengthening the garrison and extending the slave-dungeons. According to Macdonald they had established excellent relations with the traders on the river and with the chiefs in the interior. Macdonald had bought two hundred and twenty-three slaves in the space of two months, he assured Thurso; only sixteen had so far died, and three of those suicides. He was staying only to take on rice and yams before leaving for the West Indies.
Had it not been for this encouraging news, the boat party might have fared much worse at their return, and especially Haines, who presented himself some several hours later than might have been expected, haggard and bruised, his left eye blackened and half closed, his shirt blood-bedabbled, minus pistol and cartridge belt and two axes, and with two of his party missing. Haines knew he had been a fool. He expected a flogging and felt it was deserved – he had been flogged in his time for much lesser offences. In the event, he was roundly cursed by Thurso, struck in the face and confined in handcuffs and double leg irons for the night. The value of pistol and ammunition was deducted from his pay.
Much of this was done for the sake of effect. Thurso did not have high expectations of the boatswain, or any of his crew. He knew they would drink to the point of insensibility if they could get hold of liquor and that some would run if they saw an opportunity. He was angered by the loss of the two men, but the chances were that they would be recaptured. If not, he would save their wages. It was later, when the ship was fully slaved, that a full crew would be needed; and he felt fairly sure of being able to take on more men later, at Cape Mount.
Next morning, having provisioned the yawl for three days, he set off for shore, taking Paris and Simmonds with him and six members of the crew. The principal dealer along the Sherbro River was a mulatto named Tucker and he had sent word that he had slaves to sell. Four of his retainers had been dispatched to meet them and conduct them upriver to Tucker’s house. They were waiting in a light canoe in the shade of the raffia palms along the banks just within the bar, where the water eddied and sidled, flecked with muddy white.
The river was wide here and the current flowed strongly. The seamen at the oars had hard work of it to keep their guides in sight. These made against the current with astonishing swiftness in their light canoe, one man standing at prow and one at stern, leaning forward in unison to throw their weight on the long-handled paddles.
The sound of the waves breaking over the bar at the river mouth pursued them, growing sullen with distance. They were enclosed on either side by thick walls of glossy-leaved mangrove trees. Paris sought to distract his mind from the close heat and the zealous attention of various stinging creatures by noting, for future inclusion in his journal, the naked and adventitious-seeming roots of these trees, how they arched from the parent stem while some feet from the ground to form strange stilts and buttresses.
‘He is a big man in these parts, Tucker,’ Thurso said. ‘All the people you see here belong to him on both sides of the river.’ He was as near as he could ever be to good humour this morning, with the prospect of doing business, seeing an old acquaintance, though he was sweating, Paris noticed, in his hot clothes – he was dressed in his best, with braided tricorn hat and blue and silver coat with lace at the cuffs. ‘There is no trading anywhere up this river without Tucker,’ he said. ‘He is what I call a success in life, Mr Paris. He is over seventy now and has his hair and teeth still and as rich as Croesus. And he has built it all up from nothing – not like you who had the benefit of a professional training. Everything he has got he has had to work for. It was the same with me. I don’t mind admitting it, to you or any man.’ Thurso leaned forward and said in a low, hoarse mutter, ‘I was never handed anything on a silver plate. My parents were out of this world before I was four years old.’
‘Indeed, sir?’ Paris looked at the immobile, brick-coloured face, the small blue eyes that seemed now once again, this avowal or confession having been made, to seek for refuge further back and find none. The surgeon felt touched, though knowing this confidence quite probably came only because the captain despised him. It was the first in any case that Thurso had ever made. ‘You were brought up by relatives then, sir?’ he ventured, rather diffidently; he had learned that the captain suspected the motives behind all questions.
‘I was brought up by the parish.’ Thurso’s face had become more forbidding. ‘The sea has been father and mother to me,’ he said. ‘Aye, and more.’ He fell silent now and looked fixedly before him in one of the fits of dark abstraction that Paris had noticed in him before.
The river had narrowed. As they went closer in to the bank Paris saw the gauze and glint of honey bees high up among the small white flowers of the mangroves and caught the brackish smell from the ooze at their roots. Voices came from somewhere among the trees. They passed a landing stage made with moored rafts where women squatted, washing clothes at the waterside.
‘Yes,’ Thurso said, ‘Tucker may be a mulatto, but he is a man to be reckoned with.’ He spoke as if there had been no interval. Small beads of sweat had started on his brow and he wiped them away with a cambric handkerchief from his sleeve, in a gesture oddly delicate for a man of his bulk. ‘There are times he might have as many as fifty prime slaves in his pens,’ he said. ‘Of course he has some customs we might object to, as coming from more civilized society. For example he has more than one wife – seven or eight, I believe. Now we might think that little better than fornication, but it is their practice hereabouts. He knows my feelings, but I don’t let it stand in the way of business. Besides, you see, there is a sound practical reason at the back of it, which you have to know these parts properly to appreciate. Just counting his own blood kin and relations by marriage, he can send upwards of a hundred men raiding up-river, and when you add to that his personal slaves and people that are in bond to him … He gives out credit to the people when they fall on bad times. They all owe him money. They know they can be sold for slaves to pay off the debt, so they take care to keep on the right side of him. There is nothing like fear, for keeping people in order. No, Tucker has got things very well in hand considering that he came to this coast with nothing.’
The river took a wide curve between banks of low shrub; the trees had been cleared here on both sides. Their guides waited above a balustraded wooden jetty where a boat was unloading plantains in wicker baskets. On the bankside beyond, lines of washing were hanging. Tucker himself was waiting at the top of the wooden steps that went up from the jetty. He was a tall, stout patriarch, light brown in colour, with a reverend poll of white hair. He greeted his visitors with dignified ease and led them through a square compound formed by low huts where women sat in the shade preparing food and small children disputed the dust with chickens.
The house was handsome and spacious, built of timber on two storeys, with gables and a broad, open verandah. Thurso glanced at Paris as they approached it, as if to remind him that this was the property of a man who had come up from nothing. Once inside he presented the mulatto with the gifts he had brought – a case of French brandy and a pair of silver-mounted pistols.
The crew members were assigned to Tucker’s retainers and led away to be fed at the back of the house. Thurso, Paris and Simmonds were at once – though it was scarce eleven – invited to table. They had green salad from Tucker’s own garden, and bushpig stewed with paw-paws, and rice with a sauce of palm oil and pepper, all served on fine plate and accompanied by French wine. In response to compliments on the quality of this from an emboldened Simmonds, their host explained in his soft, idiosyncratic English that he had taken two dozen cases a fortnight before in part payment for slaves and ivory. Not from a French ship, but an American – a twenty-gun sloop. How a Nantucket privateer had come by fine quality French wines it was better not to ask, Tucker said, with his restrained smile. Other than this, not much news. A ruffian by the name of Yellow Henry Cook had been causing trouble and poaching on trade in the interior, but he believed that had been dealt with; Paris noted that Thurso forbore from enquiring how. Then there was the garden – he was growing marrows and trying out a type of European potato, and he had planted lemon trees. They must see it afterwards.
It was not till the end of the meal, over the brandy, that the talk turned to business. It appeared that Tucker had only six slaves in his pens at present, though all were male and guaranteed prime quality. He was expecting more within the next two or three days. He had sent a big party upriver in charge of his eldest son. If Captain Thurso would trust him for the goods, there would soon be slaves aplenty.
If Thurso was displeased at this he did not show it. Tucker was not a man to cross or ruffle in any way. He would stay the night, he said, if he could trade on his host’s hospitality so far, and leave next day. Perhaps the slaving party would return in that time. It would in any case allow his surgeon and the second mate the time for a journey further upriver to see what the English factor, Owen, had to offer.
Paris had not known that this was intended; and it was still with a feeling of surprise, and something of resentment too, at not being informed, that he found himself some half hour later seated with Simmonds in one of his host’s canoes under a low matting roof, with two oarsmen and two domestic servants of Tucker’s for escort. A second canoe, intended for slaves, led the way.
A thin haze of mist hung over the water, rendering more distant objects indistinct – the canoe in front was half hidden in it. Paris could make out the man standing at the prow, the shine of his naked shoulders as he threw himself forward on the oar, the dip and flash of the long blade; but the form of the canoe itself was lost; it was as if the negro were suspended there, to perform his regular obeisance to some deity brooding above. The sky was featureless and hot, the colour of pale brass. They passed a heron at the water’s edge, to all appearance the same grey heron, hunched and dishevelled, that he had seen in Norfolk, round the reedy borders of the Wash. But the dark yellow river swirled with less familiar things: he saw the cruising jaws of crocodiles caught in misty glitters of light.
As the channel veered away and the sea airs were lost, the forest stood still on either side and Paris felt the sweat start from his body. At the edges, beyond the ripples of their passage, the water was darker in colour and glassy: along these motionless borders lay the pale ellipses formed by the mangrove roots with their reflections, a series of perfect ovals. So motionless was the air now, in these reaches of the river, that image and reflection were seamless, undetectable; Paris found his eyes straining to distinguish the join, watching for occasional eddies to mar the surface, betray the half that was reflection into shivers.
These were like the tremors of fever. It seemed to Paris now that disease lay like a tangible presence there on the river, that they were proceeding through the very exhalations of plague. Fever shivered in the currents of the water, muttered among the mangrove flowers, rose and fell with the insects over the surface. His own sight seemed feverish and disordered to him, one moment listless, the next strangely intent.
He was relieved when a turn in the river brought them to a small landing stage, where the first canoe was tied up already and their escort stood waiting with Owen beside them, a thin figure in a straw hat and crumpled cotton suit, very white in the face, who began talking with a febrile eagerness to them almost before they had stepped out on to the planks.
‘I’m glad to see you,’ he said. ‘My people here brought me word you were on your way. Damned hot and sweltery weather, ain’t it? How is trade? What are you carrying? Usual stuff, is it?’
‘We’re a good ways from slaved yet,’ Simmonds said. ‘I don’t know if you remember me. Name of Jack Simmonds. I was on the crew of the Arabella four years ago; you had just settled in, sir. This is our doctor, Mr Matthew Paris.’
‘How de do?’ The factor’s hand was dry and hot. ‘Four years is a lifetime in this trade,’ he said in rapid and perfunctory tones. Paris met the gaze of soft, lustreless brown eyes, saw the white face move in what seemed an uncertain attempt at a smile. ‘I was set to make my fortune within three years or get out,’ Owen said, ‘and here I am still beside this stinking river.’
There was a reek of rum on his breath and his eyelids were reddish and inflamed – the more noticeably so for the pallor of his face. A refuse of palm fronds and coconut fibre littered the bank above the landing stage, with here and there the corpses of smallish, mud-coloured crabs emitting an odour of sadness and decay. The sky above had lost all colour now. For some moments the three men stood in an uncertain silence by the water, as if some other purpose had intervened, some purpose not their own, not yet fully apprehended.
‘Captain Thurso sends his compliments,’ Paris said at last. ‘He is not able to come in person, he is staying with Mr Tucker.’
At this, Owen appeared to recollect himself. ‘Tucker, there’s a man,’ he said. ‘You had better leave someone in charge of the canoes if there is anything worth stealing in them. These people are thieves, every man of them; they have no notion of private property, none at all, not an iota. They will not rob you to your face but they will pilfer you to kingdom-come.
‘Case in point,’ he continued with the same febrile eagerness as they climbed up from the mooring stage, ‘and it is why you find me a trifle in disarray at present. I have been surprised this very morning with finding the storehouse broke open and goods carried off to the value of fifty bars at least, that is near the value of a prime slave, in rum and tobacco and other goods, and small signs of discovering who are the thieves, except you bring in the Mandingo priest, which I have done, just to try it, not that a Christian can believe in their hocus-pocus tricks, but yet I have seen them perform strange things at different times while I have been a trader on the river here. On top of all that, just today my people have brought in three dead men from the bush. They are Bulum and one of them a chief of sorts – badly mutilated. He was a well-known character in these parts and so I am obliged to keep them here till they are fetched away by the Bulum priests. They are noisome already, but I can do no other, these people are particular when it comes to such matters.’
The house stood on the rise before them, a low rectangle, whitewashed mud brick on a framework of poles, with a sloping thatched roof. A wooden fence made a compound round it. Within this, in the shade of the fence, two men lay asleep, their spears beside them. A few thin hens scraped in the dust.
‘These are Susu tribesmen,’ Owen said, nodding towards the sleepers. ‘They came down from the interior, twenty days’ march from a great river, twenty times the size of this one, according to what they say – these fellows embroider everything of course. They came with a small coffle of slaves – twelve altogether, but one was dying, she couldn’t keep on her feet. You won’t believe it but they still expected me to buy her. The reason they gave was that since they had brought her all that way she must be worth something. They have got no idea of commerce. Then they wanted dashes far above the usual to make up for it. They are always optimistic; they are like children.’
His eyes were soft as a cow’s. A small nervous pulse beat in the thin hollow of his throat. Paris read in his gaze a plea to be understood, to be approved. ‘I wonder why it is we think children are optimistic,’ he said. ‘I don’t believe I was very optimistic when I was a child, rather the contrary. Most of the future was dread.’ As it is now, he thought. He was back in the dread of childhood now, with Owen’s blacks soon to examine.
‘Eh?’ Owen appeared involved for some moments in some painful effort of memory. ‘Well, no,’ he said, ‘perhaps you are right. All the same, do I look a man to buy a dying negro? I wasn’t born yesterday, I told them. It takes more than a naked savage to get the better of Timothy Owen. I purchased nine in the end, six men and three women. I have got them in the barracoon behind. Would you like to look them over now or should we go in and crack a bottle first?’
‘We should see to the business first,’ Paris said. ‘Don’t you think so, Simmonds?’
The mate was visibly divided. But after some seconds of pause he said, ‘Yes, let us get it done.’
‘The rum will still be there,’ Owen said. ‘I am glad to see you go armed, gentlemen. I never go near a captive negro without a pistol loaded and ready and someone to cover me. We’d better have these fellows along too, I think.’ He went over and kicked lightly at the sleeping men, gesturing to them when they sat up that they should follow.
They skirted the fence and passed behind the house where an acre or so of forest had been cleared. A tethered goat raised its beard at them. A full-bodied woman in a blue cotton shift was hanging clothes on the line; she did not look towards them as they passed. The barracoon stood over against the broken edges of the forest. As they approached, a vulture which had been perched on the ridge-pole raised a wattled head to regard them, then flapped indignantly away. Through a lattice-work of rafters and rush matting Paris made out the forms of the negroes inside the barracoon.
‘I made considerable efforts to have a vegetable garden here at one time,’ Owen said, with the same rapidity of speech, at once eager and distracted. He indicated a level patch of ground, as bare as the rest but marked out with a stone border. ‘I planted water melons, pompions, guinea peas. And sallet – you can have no idea how much I long for a bit of sallet, it is highly beneficial for the blood in this climate. But the damn crabs came up out of the river and devoured everything in a single night. When I looked at it in the morning it was as bare as you see it now. I never thought to make a fence against crabs, you see. There was a fence, but it was not proof against those devils, they got underneath. I never had the heart to try again. Nowadays, any time I encounter a crab, I put an end to its life.’
A smell of excrement and wood smoke came over to them from the barracoon. ‘My mind was all on larger beasts,’ Owen said. ‘I never thought of anything getting underneath. Well, gentlemen, here they are, and a finer set of slaves you would have to travel far to see. Through here.’
It was intensely hot within the shrouded enclosure of the shed. The fires on which their food had been cooked were still smouldering; the smoke was acrid, Paris felt it stinging his eyes. He peered through the miasmic interior. All nine of the slaves, men and women alike, were shackled in a line to a long metal bar that ran down the centre of the barracoon. They were completely naked. One or two looked up but most remained staring before them. The smell of excrement was stronger now, combining with the sour smell of metal and the body-musk of the Africans to form a compound which Paris had begun to recognize as the odour of captivity. Nausea stirred in him. ‘We’d better look at them out in the open,’ he said.
One by one, under the guard of two men with spears, the negroes were unshackled and brought out, blinking in the stronger light. Paris went through the sequence of peering, prodding and palpating now become familiar, beginning always with the face, the teeth and gums, the red pools between lid and eyeball, the pits of the nostrils. Custom had reduced his repugnance for the task but, perhaps paradoxically, had increased his sense of the humanity of the captives. He was beginning to know, with the same strange combination of sympathy and dispassion, the patterns of colour on an African body, zones of dark and less dark.
There was not the same pulse of fear in these negroes. They had been penned here a week now, and fear had passed into some more quiescent misery. Freed, they moved heavily as if still in chains, performing the kicks and jumps required of them with dazed docility. Three of the men were fine specimens, long-limbed and broad-shouldered, with powerful muscles in the arms and chest; but they were in a nightmare trance like the others and made no resistance. In the second of the women he examined he detected enlarged neck glands. In order to be quite sure of it he lingered for some time, pressing gently at the sides of the woman’s neck.
‘Something wrong?’ Simmonds said. He had been following Paris’s examination with his usual phlegmatic air, whistling between his teeth and occasionally kicking at the slaves, more from habit than anything else, it seemed, as they were quite unresisting.
‘She has greatly enlarged lymph glands,’ Paris said.
‘Let’s have a look. Lift your head up, darlin’.’ Simmonds tapped the woman lightly, almost playfully, under the chin with the back of his hand. ‘Yes,’ he said after a moment. ‘Oh, yes.’ He looked at Owen. ‘We can’t take this one. She has got the negro lethargy, what they calls sleepy-sickness. I seen swellin’s like them before. This here is a dead woman.’
‘I didn’t detect anything,’ Owen said. ‘I gave a good price for her.’
‘That is as may be,’ Simmonds said without emotion. ‘But she is not worth a groat now, to you or anyone. They always dies when they get them balls in the neck.’
The woman remained impassive, staring before her with discoloured eyes. A small pulse beat at her temple. Her mouth hung very slightly open; the everted lips were dark lavender in colour and puffy-looking, as if swollen. If she felt curiosity as to why her captors were spending so long over her, she gave no sign of it. Her gaze showed nothing but an exhausted endurance.
‘Let me see.’ Owen stepped forward, felt the sides of the woman’s neck for some moments, then turned to the others with his uncertain smile. ‘That is nothing, take my word for it,’ he said. ‘It is some feverish inflammation that will soon pass.’
‘I am sorry,’ Paris said, ‘but I fear Simmonds is right. They are glandular tumours, quite prominent. I cannot be mistaken, I felt them quite distinctly. The blood is already morbid in her. I know nothing of how this sickness comes but I believe it is generally fatal. It is here you feel the lumps, towards the vertebral region.’
He touched the woman’s neck again to indicate the place, then felt round the whole area of the neck and shoulders. The skin was smooth and resilient. ‘Here,’ he insisted, ‘in the hinder part of the neck. I am sorry, but we cannot take her.’
‘It seems them fellers bubbled you after all, Mr Owen,’ Simmonds said, and his normally rather bovine expression lightened perceptibly. ‘Nekkid or not,’ he added, winking broadly at Paris, to whom the mate’s jocularity at such a moment seemed insensitive to the point of sublimity.
Owen looked from Paris’s face to that of the woman. He had nodded his head at the medical details in what seemed an attempt at dignified dispassion. But at Simmonds’s remark his eyes widened and he swallowed convulsively. ‘God rot me,’ he said. ‘How can a man make a living here? These people …’ He gestured at the impassive tribesmen, who stood waiting in positions of loose attention, their long spears resting on the ground. ‘You can’t trust anyone. Everything you try and do … You buy a slave in good faith, perhaps you overlook something, we can’t always … It is true I had been drinking a little when they came in; I have had a bad bout of fever and I needed the rum to get me through. I am not through it yet, as a matter of fact. I am quite alone here, you know. There is no one …’
His mood, which had veered towards self-pity with these last words, and the sense of his solitude, grew suddenly inflamed again as he glanced at the diseased slave. His lower lip had begun to tremble. With a violent gesture, startling to those around, he took off his hat and cast it with all his force on the ground before him. He took a stride towards the woman, advancing his face furiously at her. ‘God damn your eyes,’ he shouted, ‘I am not going to feed you, do you hear? Do you think I am running a charity?’
The woman was astounded. A strained and staring quality of alertness had appeared on her face. Some low and broken sounds came from her that might have been words of entreaty. She shrank from the inexplicable fury on the white face near her own, glanced quickly to either side of her as if seeking a path for flight, then wildly up at the blank and colourless sky above the barracoon.
‘Do you hear me?’ Owen seized her arm and tugged at her as if in an infuriated attempt to compel her straying attention. ‘Not another mouthful,’ he shouted. ‘You can get out.’ Enfeebled by illness and emotion, he could not drag her back and forth as he seemed to intend. With an effort he swung her round and pushed her violently forward so that she took some staggering steps towards the edge of the trees. Liberated thus, she stopped and stood still for some moments, as if incredulous. She raised her head to look again at the sky. There was blood round her ankles with the chafing of the fetters. It came to Paris, with a sensation of surprise, that she was beautiful. He saw her swallow at hope or fear. Then she moved forward again lightly and rapidly, without a glance behind, and disappeared into the darkness of the forest.
There was a short silence. Then Owen appeared to notice his hat. He retrieved it and restored it to his head with an attempt at a flourish. ‘I think you will agree I handled that with proper firmness,’ he said. His hands were trembling and after some moments he thrust them into the pockets of his jacket. ‘You think it is funny when a man is cheated, Mr Simmonds?’ he said. ‘Well, I must spoil your joke – those Susu people would not have known her condition when they sold her to me.’
Whatever his private opinion, Simmonds had the grace to assent to this, and the examination was resumed, though Paris found his mind still on the diseased girl and the lightsome way she had stepped into the dark refuge of the forest. He found nothing amiss with the remaining slaves and left the bargaining to Simmonds. This passed reasonably quickly as it was a question merely of agreeing on the purchase price in bars – Owen would come out to the ship within a day or two to haggle with the redoubtable Thurso and make his choice of the goods.
When this was concluded and the slaves back in the barracoon, the three men returned to the house. They took their rum on the verandah. Owen pressed them eagerly to stay the night but Simmonds was for returning downriver. He made it a matter of duty that the slaves should be conveyed that night but in fact he was not properly easy in his present company and the place was lonely. His shipmates were at Tucker’s, there would be drink in plenty there, and women.
Owen turned to Paris. Would he not stay? He could get off early in the morning, there would be time enough. ‘The life is monotonous here,’ the factor said. ‘I do not see much company of my own sort.’
Paris was not sure that he cared to be included in this category, but the pathos of the understatement half won him and the mild and desperate eyes did the rest. And so it was decided: Simmonds would convey the slaves that evening under guard provided by Owen, Paris would remain until next morning.
The mate began preparing to leave at once, desire for more drink routed by the fear of being caught on the river in the dark with a boatload of slaves. Fettered by the legs in pairs, their arms bound tightly behind them, the negroes were thrust into the waist of Owen’s longboat. With a heavily armed Simmonds at the stern and the two Susu spearmen forming a guard, they cast off. Owen and Paris watched the boat out of sight then mounted again to the house. The woman who had been hanging out washing was now in the lean-to beside the house, sitting on a low stool, thighs spread, winding cotton thread round a wooden spool. She looked intensely black in the shade there, so black that her skin glinted blue like coal, reminding Paris of the Kru people who had ferried his first slaves. She watched the approach of the two men without expression. Her face was broad and flat-boned, with a low forehead and a wide, sullen mouth.
‘This one friend me, he sleep here one night,’ Owen said. ‘Two person chicken rice, you sabee?’ He indicated Paris and himself with rapid gestures then made motions of eating. ‘I don’t trust the bitch,’ he said moodily to Paris. ‘Here, come in here.’
The house was built on a single storey with rooms leading off a narrow verandah. Owen led the way into what was evidently his living-room. Rush mats covered an earth floor. There was a European-style couch in worn red plush and some upright chairs round a bamboo table. ‘Have a seat,’ Owen said. ‘She’ll bring in the rum, she knows my habits by this time.’
He had barely finished speaking when the woman came in with glasses and bottle and set them down on the low table. She was tall and full-bodied. The cotton shift was strained across her hips and fell above the knees, showing thick, shapely legs with a faint down of black hair. Having set down bottle and glasses, she looked at Owen briefly and insolently, uttered some soft and high-pitched words and swayed out.
‘She is getting above herself,’ Owen said, with a wry smile that seemed to be intended as an apology. ‘I shall get rid of her one of these days. She has brought her family in and I am expected to maintain ’em all, father, mother, maternal grandmother, two sisters and a man she claims is her cousin. I have reason to think she plays the whore with the men who come here in the way of trade. And moreover I suspect it is her relatives that broke into the storehouse and made away with goods. But I intend calling in the Mandingo priest to get to the bottom of that business. These are difficult times, Mr Paris. On every hand there is news coming in of things miscarrying one way or another. There is Captain Potter’s being cut off by slaves at Mano and the ship driven ashore and the captain, the second mate and the doctor all killed in the most barbarous manner – the slaves were all taken by the natives again and sold to other vessels, so they in no way mended their condition by their enterprise. And along the river here things are rendered difficult lately: it is dangerous to pass and repass because Captain Engelduc, upon his coming up the river, has refused the king his custom, or dashee as we call it, which has bred a great palaver between the king and all the whites trading along the river. Come, Mr Paris, you are not drinking, sir.’
‘I am well enough,’ Paris said. ‘You need not wait on me – I will see to my own glass.’ He watched the factor pour himself out a liberal measure. The light was fading now, shadows lengthened over the rough walls. In the silence Paris thought he heard a faint, continuous pattering sound like distant drums – or perhaps it was the sea, audible even here. This was Owen’s evening then, the rum, the fading light, the smell of hot palm oil, the view across the baked clay of the compound to where the land dipped towards the river … ‘This is my first voyage,’ he said. ‘I am new to the trade and I do not perfectly know how it is conducted. I saw that you agreed on a price in bars with Simmonds, and that is the same as they do with slaves that are brought to the ship.’
‘I trade at the same prices as they do who take slaves to the ship. That is only fair, as I keep them penned here at my expense, convenient for the ships’ boats. There are two rates of bars, one up country and one aboard ship. The ship’s bar is worth twenty per cent more. At present prices a male slave in good condition can be purchased up country, by those that will bring them down – travelling traders like the Vai people and these Susu that are here now – for twenty country bars, which when brought down here we buy for thirty-five or forty. The same slave, sold on board ship or here from the barracoon, will fetch sixty-five ship’s bars, which is equal to above eighty country bars. So I get eighty for laying out forty and the difference is made up in trade goods.’
The dark was gaining now and Owen rose to light the oil lamp on the table. His hands trembled no longer, Paris noted – the rum had steadied him. The lamp had been badly trimmed and it cast a wavering light over the walls of the room and the coarse matting on the floor. Owen’s brows and eyes were left in shadow as he sat back in his chair.
‘It is in determining the value of a bar that you find yourself exercised,’ the factor said. ‘A man has to keep himself abreast of things. The value of a bar can go up or down, Mr Paris, depending on the supply of slaves. A man can incur losses. I have seen men ruined on this coast, decent men, traders like myself, ruined, sir, for failing to remember that the price of a slave can fluctuate.’
Owen leaned forward and the lamplight fell on his face. His eyes were unsteady and Paris saw him frown slightly in what seemed an effort to focus them. ‘For instance, a country bar,’ he said in slow recital, ‘may be worth fifty flints today and sixty-five two days from now. A piece of blue baft is worth ten bars as I speak to you now. Tomorrow, who knows? A man’s intellects are exhausted keeping up with it.’
‘All the same,’ Paris said, ‘if I understand you aright, you are making substantial profits.’
‘Aye, sir, I would be, but for the exorbitant behaviour of the people here, that carry it all away. Your profits are brought down by the expenses of the kings and your own people, which are very unreasonable and great. For example in Sherbro there are three kings who divide the country among them, as well as others of less note. Every one of these expects custom from a white trader, which comes to twenty bars at your first visit, and after perhaps ten or twelve, if you bring a shallop or a longboat. I tell you, I am standing still. I have no more stock now than I did twelve month since.’
Owen paused to refill his glass. His movements were slower now and more deliberate. When he spoke again it was in a different tone, more consciously sociable. ‘You are lately from England, I take it,’ he said. ‘I envy you. How you must look forward to returning there.’
‘No, I do not. To be frank with you, I think I would be content not to set foot in England again as long as I live.’
His voice, deep and rather vibrant at any time, had betrayed an intensity of feeling surprising even to himself. The question, Owen’s assumption, natural as it was, had caught him off guard.
But the factor was too rhetorical with rum by now, and too much occupied with his own deprivations, to notice much of this. ‘You surprise me, sir,’ he merely said. ‘When I consider what it is to live in England, the happiness of conversation, the pleasures of a life free from all inconveniences which must certainly happen in this wilderness, where the inhabitants are scarcely above beasts, ignorant of all arts and sciences, without the comfort of religion, destitute of all wholesome laws …’
‘Comfort of religion?’ Despite himself, Paris’s tone had quickened. He had drunk considerably less than the factor, but what he had drunk had inclined him to acerbity rather than indulgence, and the phrase Owen had used was hateful to him. ‘Do you think we have wholesome laws in England?’ he said. ‘I have heard my fellow-Englishmen described in precisely the words you are using, and by those that were busy penning them up. Our good captain uses terms not much different to describe his crew.’
Owen seemed about to reply, but then his expression changed suddenly. ‘Here she is,’ he said. ‘She has come at last with our supper. You have taken your time, haven’t you?’
The woman had entered silently. Her moving form in the lamplight sent shadows flexing about the room. She set down the dishes on the table, straightened herself and stood still for some moments, though without looking directly at Owen.
‘Do you think I don’t know where you have been?’ Owen said. ‘She pretends not to understand anything,’ he added to Paris. ‘Me go call Mandingo priest-man,’ he said loudly. ‘He catchee thief. Tomorrow – do you hear that?’
The woman glanced indifferently at him then turned and walked slowly out of the room.
‘She has been plotting with her relatives,’ Owen said. ‘But I have given her something to think about now. Serve yourself, sir. Let us not stand on ceremony.’
Paris took boiled fowl and rice and a sauce of palm oil and chopped peppers. Small black flies had entered the room; he felt the occasional sting through his shirt. Glancing up, he found Owen’s eyes on him in a wide, unsteady stare.
‘The Mandingos have a fashion of finding things out,’ the factor said. ‘I did not believe it when I came here at first, but I have seen things with my own eyes … They follow the law of Mahomit according to the Alchorn, as they learn it from the Moors of Barbary and elsewhere, and so fetches it down here by these wandering pilgrims. You may say it is not reasonable for a Christian man to believe they are able to perform anything above the common run. But I have seen them with nothing but a few feathers and a handful of sand find out the secrets of futurity and things that people have spoke of to no one. It is my belief they have the power of some evil spirit or familiar sent to them by the great enemy, to draw these ignorant Bulums to himself.’
The rum he had drunk, the wavering light, his host’s oddly disconnected speech, had combined to confuse Paris. It seemed to him for a moment that the factor was referring to some powerful and malignant slave trader further in the interior. ‘Who is that?’ he said. ‘Further upriver, is he?’
‘I am talking about Satan.’ Owen looked gloomily before him. His mood was turning morose. He had eaten very little and now thrust his plate aside and reached again for the bottle. ‘It is by Satan’s help these ignorant wretches are so deceived,’ he said.
‘The Bulum compose the local population, don’t they? Is the woman … your housekeeper, is she a Bulum?’
‘No, she belongs to the Kru people.’
‘They are darker, aren’t they? Yellow Henry and his band are Bulum, I suppose. Well, he is a mulatto of course, but –’
‘You were acquainted with Henry Cook then?’
‘It was he who came with our first slaves.’
‘He’ll never come with another.’ Owen clapped white, slender hands at a fly, looking afterwards with a sort of hallucinated intensity for traces on his palms.
‘Why? What do you mean?’
But the factor had reverted to his former gloomy staring and made no reply. He remained silent for some considerable time with his head sunk on his chest. Paris was beginning to think he had gone to sleep when he spoke again, in the blurred and dogged fashion of a man contending with his own obscured senses to reach to the heart of truth. ‘No,’ he said, ‘for all religion these Bulums have only the Porra Man.’
‘Who is he?’
‘There is a secret mystery that these people have kept for many ages, or for all we know since their first foundation. It goes by the name of Porra or Porra Men. These men are marked in their infancy by the priests with three or four rows of small dents upon their backs and shoulders. Anyone that has not these marks they look on as of no account. There is one among the rest who personates the devil or Porra. He hides himself in some convenient place within call and upon his priests shouting he in the bush answers it with a terrible screech. Wherever the women or white men or any that is not Porra hear it, they fly immediately to their houses and shut all the windows and doors. Any caught outside will be torn to pieces.’
Owen raised his head and fixed the surgeon with a sombre regard. ‘I have heard them,’ he said. ‘I have heard the screams. Sounds carry in this place. The Porra hasn’t come this far yet, though.’ He attempted a derisive expression, but there was no change in his eyes. ‘It is all nonsense anyway, no one but a savage could believe in it. They come into town afterwards, this mock devil with his gang about him, and he speaks through a reed, and he tells on what account he comes and demands liquor and victuals. Then he goes away with singing and dancing and all is quiet again. ’Tis all faking – anyone with the curiosity to peer out of their houses would see it was only a man dressed up.’
‘They surely cannot lack for curiosity to that extent,’ Paris said. ‘Either they are too terrified to look out or – and this I think more probable – they accept the mummery for the sake of order, just as we do. You say these people are charlatans. Well, just look at England, she is a paradise for Porra Men: the Church and the learned professions and parliament are full of them.’
He hesitated here, with some feeling of compunction. Owen’s eyes were mournful and moist – he had wanted only to confide his solitude, his fears of the dark. But the surgeon was a little drunk and the memory of his shame was hot in his mind and his old vice of prideful assertiveness had him now in its grip. ‘The system works better here,’ he said. ‘It has great consequence for the peace of the country. In Liverpool, not long before I left, a gang of seamen started to break up a brothel where one of them had been robbed. Others joined in. The watch was powerless to do anything. In the end they had to call in a regiment of militia and read the riot act. Two seamen and a passer-by were killed outright and one of the girls crippled for life before they could restore order.’ Paris paused, smiling his bitter, lop-sided smile. He was arrogant with superior wisdom and intensely dislikeable at this moment. ‘If it had happened here,’ he said, ‘just one screech from the bushes would have solved all.’
‘Are you comparing things at home to this benighted place? I see you are one of those who always think they know better.’ Owen raised his head to look steadily at Paris. Anger had stiffened him, given clarity to his speech. ‘You do not know better, sir. You do not know worse, even. You know nothing at all of the nature of life here, along this pestilential river.’
There was silence between them for a short while. Paris sat with shoulders bowed, his big-knuckled hands thrust between his knees as if for safekeeping. Then he looked squarely into the other man’s face. ‘You are right,’ he said, ‘and I am sorry that I spoke as I did.’ Rage to have the better of it, unwillingness to compromise, these were old failings in him, if failings they be. New, however – no older than Ruth’s death – was the swift remorse that would come to him, a feeling like sorrow, at having delivered a wound for the mere sake of argument. The kind of truth that can be asserted by argument had lost all glamour, all lustre, for him, seeming no more now than another aspect of that ancient urge – much older than the desire for truth – to command attention, dominate one’s fellows. The fuddled man before him was truth enough. He had belittled the nature of the factor’s servitude. Owen needed to despise his surroundings in order to endure them. That a man engaged in this cruel trade still deserved not to be treated with cruelty seemed a mystery to Paris rather than a truth; but it was one which contained a strong imperative for him. ‘Why don’t you get out?’ he said gently. ‘Why don’t you leave this place?’
‘Get out?’ Owen laughed on a rising note. ‘Where to? All my capital is sunk here. I cannot return a pauper, they do not welcome prodigal sons. No, I am caught here, seven degrees above the line, three thousand miles from my native seat.’ He laughed again briefly and licked slowly and carefully round his mouth. ‘I am hoping for an upturn in trade,’ he said in low tones. ‘Before the Porra Man gets me, eh, Mr Paris?’
It was Paris’s private view that fever and rum would find Owen first; but he was relieved to see the expression of weak jocularity that had come now to his host’s face. ‘I was something of a Porra Man myself, in England,’ he said, not knowing quite what he meant, wanting to keep Owen in this lighter mood.
In this he succeeded. The factor had come round full circle and was disposed to sodden laughter now. The notion of this rather gangling, crease-faced guest of his lurking and screeching was one he found very risible. And it was on this note of mirth and restored amity that the two men parted for the night, Owen unsteadily to his bedroom, where the Kru woman had lain asleep some hours already, Paris to the small guest room at the end of the house, with its bunk bed and net canopy and its own door on to the verandah.
Here he lay for a long time sleepless, in spite of the drink, thinking of the diseased slave woman and the voracious, mud-coloured crabs creeping up from the river, and of the extraordinary ramifications of this trade in human creatures. Fumbling in his mind for some grasp of the complex chain of transactions between the capture of a negro and the purchase of a new cravat by Erasums Kemp, his cousin, or the giving of a supper party by his uncle, he thought he heard again that distant pattering sound of surf or drums. There were occasional cries of night birds. Some time during the night he thought he heard the mutter of voices and afterwards groans that might have been caused by love or nightmare. Finally he fell into a troubled sleep, only to be brought awake again, not much after dawn, by the need to void his bladder.
He dressed and passed out on to the verandah and from there to the side of the house that was nearest to him. There was a chill in the air but no breath of wind. A thin mist lay over the compound and the shrub beyond it. There were sleeping forms under brightly coloured blankets in the lean-to where the woman had sat winding her thread.
Paris passed behind the house, avoided approaching too near the barracoon, which was silent and partly shrouded in mist, and urinated against the far side of a low shed near the edge of the clearing. In the immediate, mildly scalding pleasure of the discharge, he noticed nothing; but as he buttoned himself and prepared to return he became aware of a smell of animal decomposition, cold, dank, quite unmistakable. It did not come, as he thought at first, from within the forest, but from immediately before him, from inside the shed. He hesitated briefly then advanced his face to peer through the splintered plank. In rapid review, in the seconds before recoil, he saw three naked bodies, bloodstreaked and dreadfully staring, one bigger than the others, on its back, a big-featured face he knew, despite the blood-filled sockets where the eyes had been, a mounded belly the colour of dry clay, incongrously soft and smooth-looking, with a smear of red on it like a cattle brand. Flies had found them out, even thus early – he saw the gauzy glint of wings. One outflung hand had a thumb missing. He remembered the men who had held up their hands and grinned … As though reinforced by this recognition, the smell grew denser, sickening. Paris went back as though pursued across the clearing. He thought he heard a faint rattling from the barracoon. Glancing up he saw two vultures, heads settled on necks, asleep on the ridge-pole.
Later, at breakfast, he said nothing of his discovery to Owen, who was sick-looking and uncommunicative this morning, though he produced coffee for his guest from a carefully hoarded store, for which Paris was profoundly grateful. The Kru woman was nowhere to be seen.
‘Well,’ Paris said, as one of his oarsmen pushed barefoot against the mooring post and the canoe edged out towards midstream, ‘I hope your Mandingo priest will get to the bottom of things.’ It was the only hope he felt able to express for Owen. As the river began to curve away he turned to look back. The factor was still there, diminutive and lonely, standing on the bankside amidst the detritus of palm leaves and dead crabs, watching him out of sight. At the last moment Owen took off his hat and waved it once. Then the canoe took the bend and he was cancelled abruptly; the forested banks resumed their sway, concealing all traces. That scrape of human lodgement, focal point of wretchedness, the house, the compound, Owen with his longing for salad and polite manners, the shackled slaves in the stinking barracoon, no smallest hint of it remained.
The river was the only reality here. The river was the link of trade. Slaves came down from the upper reaches, perhaps hundreds of miles. The river bore them down to its bellowing mouth, the terrible ordeal of the surf, the open sky, the waiting ships. Wherever on this coast that there were rivers it would be the same. The rivers of Africa admitted the slavers to her vitals …
The long, light canoe was making good speed. The oarsmen set up a rhythmic cry as they thrust on the poles, perhaps in warning of their approach, as the channel was winding and the craft in midstream. But the men who were rowing him were so like those he had seen in the barracoon, in colour and in general cast of feature – he was beginning to notice such things now – that this wild cry of theirs seemed irresistibly to Paris like a cry of mourning for those in chains, who were too lost to mourn for themselves.