It was an uneventful voyage, apart from the attempt of one negro to put an end to his life by severing the veins of his neck with his nails. While dressing the wounds Paris learned from Jimmy that the man had been falsely convicted of witchcraft and sold to pay his fine. ‘Very good way for make money,’ Jimmy said. ‘Man got nothin’. So they sell ’em.’
They rounded the cape and came to anchor in eleven fathoms, abreast of the river and within sight of the fort. Their approach was saluted with three guns and Thurso returned the same number.
In the afternoon a Company pinnace with twelve oars came out for them, rowed by looser-built, lither men, Paris noticed, than the Kru boatmen of the Grain Coast they had just left. Thurso left the ship in charge of Barton, and he and the surgeon embarked in the pinnace for shore. The town at this distance was a low jumble of native huts set in a mesh of greenery. Lying to the left of it, on a rocky eminence above the river bank, rose the white fort, shimmering in the sunshine, dramatic and imposing, with its block towers and high, crenellated walls. Paris made out the Union Jack flying from the battlements, and another flag, blue and white – the colours of the Company, Thurso told him.
With astonishing judgement and skill, the oarsmen brought them to shore through the violent paroxysms of the surf. They mounted the slope of the foreshore, past narrow fishing boats curved high at the prow, with tufted fetish-bundles tied at their heads. It was hot here, out of the breeze, and the strength of the light troubled Paris’s eyes. Screens of nets were drying on poles and the scraps of fish scales caught in them glinted and flashed.
Escorted by the Company negroes, they made their way past marshy flats where naked children ran, flies rose in swarms, geese and ducks pottered in the muddy water. There was a strench of dead crabs from the river bank and of decaying coconuts that had been half buried in the sand to rot the fibre free.
The walls of the fort rose above them with an intensity of white almost blinding. There was to Paris a terrible strangeness in this great monumental structure amidst the squalid and provisional evidences of life around them: the cluttered, evil-smelling shore, the ramshackle town, the signs everywhere of a collaboration with the forces of nature that was tentative and temporary. The battlemented walls denied all this; they asserted the principle of permanence. There would always be profits to make, interests to defend. In the fertile interior of Africa her children, her greatest resource, would multiply endlessly and come down in endless procession to be sold below these walls, beside the sea.
The way they were following rose more steeply in the last few hundred yards as they approached the rocky bluff on which the fort was built. Then they were in the sharp black shadows of the buttresses and Paris felt immediate relief from the assaults of heat and light. The heavy gates stood open. The soldiers on sentry duty, one at either side, straightened from their position of ease without coming fully to attention, their tunics dark red in the deep shadow.
They were conducted to the Governor’s quarters, up flights of stone stairs with steps of alternate white and black, freshly painted. On the landing, defending the approach, two small brass cannon squatted. Crossed pikes stood on the wall behind. There was a passage and a narrow hallway, also hung with weapons; then finally the door to the Governor’s chambers.
He was there to receive them, a handsome, pale-mouthed man with a high bridge to his nose and a languid, murmuring manner of speech. His shirt was elaborately ruffled with lace at the neck and cuffs and he wore a short silver wig with curled rolls above the ears.
‘Captain Thurso, Mr Paris,’ he said, with minimum effort of the lips. ‘I am glad to make your acquaintance. We have not had dealings before, Captain, I believe?’
‘No, sir.’ Bewigged, cocked hat under his arm, in his ceremonial broadcloth, Thurso looked out of his element here, in this wainscoted room, with its several low tables and armless leather chairs. Paris was reminded of their first meeting, in Liverpool, with his uncle present, when Thurso had worn that same look of staring outrage, as if he had been derided. The captain was a fish that could only swim in a certain water …
‘I did trade with Mr Charles Gordon,’ he said now, in his hoarse and lingering fashion. The words seemed forced from the depths by the pressure of some urgent secret, as if only a rage to confide could have steered them up through his windpipe. His confidences, when they came, were not distinguished by tact, however. ‘In these last years,’ he said, ‘I have seen three Governors come and go, two under the old charter of the Royal Africa Company and one since the new Company took over.’
‘You are a man of much experience,’ the Governor said, moving his almost bloodless lips in the semblance of a smile. ‘Please be seated, gentlemen. Will you take a glass of port, Captain?’
‘Thank you, sir, I will.’
‘And you, Mr Paris?’
‘I would be content with a little lemon water, something of that kind.’
‘You do not care for port then?’
‘Not in this heat.’ Paris’s tone was abrupt. Whatever the progress he had made towards humility, he was no better able than before to bear with condescension.
‘You are right, sir,’ the Governor said. ‘You are a man of sense, I can see. The captain is well seasoned and I dare say it does him no harm, but I never touch it myself in the middle hours of the day. I have some barley water here. Will that suffice?’
‘Thank you.’
‘Your port, Captain. Gentlemen, good health! I will not join you at present, pray forgive me. What I generally have at this time of afternoon, or just a little later, is a syllabub of cream and thin cider, sweetened with a modicum of honey. I find it answers very well. What do you think of such a dish, sir?’
‘Think of it?’ Paris found himself being regarded closely. For all the nonchalance of the tone, the Governor’s eyes were fixed on him with a distinct sharpness of interest. ‘I would think it healthsome and nourishing,’ he said.
‘I am glad to hear you say that, sir. I prepare it myself, with my own hands. To teach my last imbecile of an orderly how to make it in the right proportions took me months, gentlemen, and I cannot tell you what stores of patience. And no sooner was he schooled to it than he succumbed to an ague of some sort that is going round among the troops. I find myself unable to face the prospect of beginning all over again with another, so I do it now myself.’
The Governor paused and appeared to muse some moments, looking down his nose. ‘Yes,’ he said softly. ‘I find it answers pretty well.’
It seemed to Paris now that he could hear screams, though he could not tell from where they were coming – somewhere outside, it seemed.
‘Charles Gordon, whom you did business with, Captain, was my predecessor here,’ he heard the Governor say in his well-bred, languid tones. ‘He died of a putrid fever. He died in the room next to this one. His predecessor died in this room where we are standing, of a burst blood vessel. But whether we say they died of this or that, they both died of the same thing, gentlemen.’
‘Oh, aye, what was that?’ Thurso said with interest.
‘They died through not taking proper care of themselves. Diet is the key to it. Would you not agree, as a medical man, Mr Paris?’
‘I do not know. There are other factors in a climate such as this one. Certainly, diet is important.’ The screams were coming from somewhere below them. Paris glanced towards the windows. The drapes were drawn against the strong light. He thought of the flights of stairs they had mounted to come here. The rooms must lie along the ramparts of the fort, facing the afternoon sun …
‘Yes, I am sorry,’ the Governor said. He had noticed the surgeon’s distraction. ‘There is a private of marines being flogged; they have chosen just this time to do it and sounds rise to us here from the courtyards in spite of –’
‘Well, you need not apologize to us, sir,’ Paris said, rather too hastily. ‘Our ears will recover from the discomfort more quickly than will his back.’
The Governor’s eyebrows had risen slightly at this impetuous speech, but when he spoke his expression had resumed its usual frigid composure. ‘It was I who ordered him the flogging,’ he said. ‘He stole a snuff-box from my study and sold it for drink – it was quite clearly proved upon him. I ordered him a hundred lashes. The snuff-box was one I set particular store by, it had a sentimental value for me. You will understand my feelings when I tell you that it was a present from a lady.’
Paris could not for the moment find a response to this, though it was clear one was expected – the Governor had addressed him, not Thurso, no doubt supposing the captain incapable of finer feelings. It was he, the captain, however, who saved the present silence from lengthening awkwardly. Not finding much of interest in this tale of a theft and a flogging, he had been glancing into the corners of the room for some time and now said, ‘I believe these chambers have been refurbished since the last occasion I had the honour to be here? And I noticed as we came up that the timber and the ironwork on the gates are new.’
‘Yes, you are right, Captain,’ the Governor said. ‘There have been extensive repairs. The work was begun in the days of my predecessor and has not been long completed. The Company, when it took over the fort from the Royal Africa Company, which as you know is now dissolved, finding it dilapidated and in some parts ruinous, thought fit to expend some considerable sums on its reconstruction. They were right to do so, in my view. This fort is the visible evidence of our presence here; it must be made imposing. We are judged by it, sir, not only the power and wealth of the Company but that of our whole nation. By their works shall ye know them, as the Scriptures say. Competition for trade is increasing all down the coast. We cannot rest on our laurels. The Company is very much alive to the importance of the image it presents.’
The Governor lay back in his chair, as if the energy required for this speech had exhausted him. He drew out a square of cambric from his sleeve and dabbed at his temples and the corners of his lips. A scent of lavender expanded in the still air of the room. The screaming had stopped now, but the regular sound of the lash continued.
‘They were obliged to bring craftsmen out,’ the Governor sighed after a moment. ‘All the oak for the interior panelling had to be imported. Imagine the difficulty we were under, in getting these wretched people to transport the stone. With their distaste for work of any kind, our labour here was worse than that confronting the pharaohs of old. Well, gentlemen, it grows time for me to busy myself with my syllabub. With your permission, I shall give you over to the care of one of our factors, Mr Saunders, who will take you down to see the slaves. After that you might like to take your ease for a while. Saunders will show you your quarters. I look forward to seeing you both again at supper.’
He rang a small brass handbell that had been lying on the table before him. An African in white tunic and drawers appeared instantly and was told to fetch Mr Saunders, for whom they waited some minutes in a silence made rather uneasy by Thurso’s audible breathing and the Governor’s total immobility. There was no sound at all now from the courtyard below, but it seemed to Paris that he could hear a faint but steady sound of hammering from some more distant source. The Governor kept his nose and mouth buried in his handkerchief, though he freed them once to ask the surgeon his opinion of the efficacy of watered spirits in preventing disease. ‘The Company doctor here recommended a glass of red wine with the juice of half a lemon and a little sugar as a good defence against contagion,’ he said, ‘but he died of fever a month ago, leaving me in some doubt of his remedy.’
The surgeon was seeking to reply to this when there was a knock at the door and Saunders entered. He was youngish, perhaps not more than thirty or so, but sunken-eyed and haggard. With him as their guide they returned to ground level and thence through stone-floored passages towards what Paris thought might be the rear of the fort, the side facing away from the sea. But the corridors twisted and turned and after a while he had lost all sense of direction.
As they proceeded he began to feel a sort of remote terror, the anxiety that comes sometimes in dreams of labyrinths, when each turning threatens to confront us with something intolerable and we struggle to wake before we reach it.
What he might meet he did not know. No one can keep account of damage done to himself. We imagine we have absorbed the shock, the harm, but we have merely caged it, and not in a strong cage either. It waits within the bars for a signal. And however long the wait may be, the leap is always unerring; a man can after twenty years be struck by a horror he thought he had forgotten and it will be green and fresh as ever. Often the pounce comes before the mind knows the signal, as it came to Paris now with the smell of the dank stone, the smell of degradation somewhere ahead of him, a horror almost incredulous that he was lost here, in this place, that he, who had prided himself on his vigilant clarity of mind and ruined himself for it, could have been his own self-deceiver, could have made his own despair a reason for compounding the misery of the world, and that he could have called this monstrous egotism self-abnegation and offered it to a dead woman as a proof of love. The dead could only be mourned. Love is for the living, he thought suddenly, and the thought dispelled his fear.
A final turn brought them to the slave-dungeons, set side by side like cells, with barred fronts and stone walls and high barred windows, through which the afternoon sun was falling now in straight rays; he had been right, they were at the rear of the fort, against the outside walls. Three of the dungeons were occupied now, two with men handcuffed together in pairs and one with unshackled girls and women. Sunlight for this hour was caged there with them. Motes of dust moved with gauzy flies through the bright air. The bodies of the slaves were flecked and stippled and the straw that covered the earth floors was luminous gold. The smells of excrement and trodden straw seemed like a release of this flooding warmth of sunshine. Through the barred embrasures in the walls, Paris heard the hammering again, much closer now, a double-stroke, impatient and swift, metal on wood. Then he saw that one of the women had come forward and was standing pressed against the bars in a shaft of sunlight. She was looking directly at him – he saw the gleam of her eyes. But her face was shadowed. Sunlight fell on her from the window behind, her face and head were edged with fire. She was naked but he took in little of her form beyond that she was slender and straight-shouldered. She was somehow protected from closer scrutiny by her stillness, which struck him suddenly as sacramental, and by the edging of fire around her. He looked at her steadily but she did not look away. He had a moment of slight dizziness, as if he had made some too precipitate movement.
‘Thirty-six in all,’ Saunders said. ‘We are expecting a batch from up country.’
In this stronger light Paris saw that the factor was younger than he had at first supposed, perhaps not much more than twenty, though much wasted by some recent fever. ‘What is that persistent hammering?’ he asked.
‘There has been an outbreak of jail fever among the garrison troops,’ Saunders said. ‘There are two more dead of it since yesterday. The carpenters are making coffins for the dead. It has not touched the slaves, I am glad to say.’
‘Shall we get to business?’ Thurso said. ‘We have had enough talking round the matter.’ Away from the oppression of the drawing-room and the governor’s presence, he was himself again, in his proper element, with the penned creatures and the bargaining. ‘Those are never Wika people, those men there,’ he said, pointing towards a group of tall, very robust negroes. ‘See those heads, Mr Paris? Look at the limbs of those men, see how they stare back at us. Those are Corymantee negroes, Mr Saunders. What are they doing so far west?’
‘There is a story to that,’ Saunders said, a little uneasily as it seemed.
‘I warrant there is.’
‘They were taken from a Dutch slaver returning from Elmina.’
‘Taken? How do you mean? Are you saying the Dutchman was already slaved and they were taken off her?’
‘She wasn’t fully slaved, she was still trading. She had about twenty Gold Coast negroes aboard and some ivory and gold dust. She was boarded by natives from King George Town. I don’t know the details. I believe there were not more than four or five able-bodied crew on the ship at the time – some were down with dysentery and some away trading upriver. The blacks came in boats at night and got aboard her. They overpowered the people on deck and carried off the slaves.’
‘And brought ’em here,’ Thurso said, with a peculiar intonation.
‘Yes. That is, they found their way here. As I say, I am not familiar with the details.’
‘I dare say not. Well, I am not concerned to enquire too closely. In this business it is he who possesses the merchandise that has best title to it. And they are fine fellows. Intractable though,’ he added quickly. ‘Devilish proud. There are those who will not bid for Corymantee negroes on any terms. Too much trouble, you know. Still, I will take ’em off your hands, subject to our doctor here casting an eye over ’em. Fifty-eight bars is the price I have been trading at, up on the Sherbro. I will make it sixty for those Gold Coast men, for the sake of avoiding argument.’
‘The price here is seventy-five bars,’ Saunders said. ‘For all male slaves in prime condition, independent of where they hail from. And sixty-eight for women.’
Expressions of outrage Paris had seen before on the captain’s face; but the present one surpassed them all. ‘Seventy-five bars?’ The words came in a harsh, incredulous whisper. He turned his body stiffly round towards Paris, his only ally now, however uncongenial. ‘Did you hear that, Mr Paris? That is near twenty-five guineas in coin of the realm. The prices cannot have jumped so high. When Mr Gordon was Company Agent here there was not this difference; he kept to prices prevailing on the coast.’
‘You had best speak to the Governor about it, not to me.’ Saunders looked suddenly very young, despite his emaciation, and distinctly unhappy. ‘No one else has any say. The Company sent me out as factor but I have no more scope than a dog here – and it is a dog’s life altogether, sir. So you would do best to enquire of the Governor.’
‘I will, be sure of it,’ Thurso said grimly. ‘Come, Mr Paris, there is nothing to be done here for the moment.’
However he had no opportunity at supper, where he found himself seated at some distance from the Governor, below the commander of the garrison, a Major Donlevy, and the Company Treasurer, whose name was Eager, with a young man named Delblanc, described as an artist, on his other side, and Paris opposite with two silent Swedes beside him, whose names the captain hadn’t caught. There were no women at table.
Thurso had already tucked his napkin under his chin and dipped his spoon into his soup when a tall negro in a dark suit and a clerical neckband, who had been introduced as the Reverend Kalabanda, rose to his feet, closed his eyes in the hush and intoned in a voice of considerable resonance: ‘O Most Merciful Father, we give thee humble thanks for this thy special bounty, beseeching thee to continue thy loving-kindness unto us, that our land may yield us her fruits of increase, to thy glory and our comfort, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.’
He resumed his seat in the midst of murmured amens, and addressed himself gravely to his soup.
‘Your English is extremely good, Mr Kalabanda,’ Paris said, speaking across the table. ‘I congratulate you on it.’
The vicar smiled at Paris’s compliments and the small scars high on his cheeks, which Paris thought might be due to ceremonial cuts, stretched with his smile. He was stout and muscular, his arms and shoulders straining his clerical coat. His eyes were coal black and lustrous and the skin of his face shone with health. ‘I have spent many years in England,’ he said. ‘Most of my life. I was at school and at theological college there.’
‘This man is a credit to his family, Mr Paris,’ the Governor said, in his expiring tones. ‘He is a living demonstration of what the African is capable of, given sobriety and good governance.’
‘Aye, dammit, that is the key to the business,’ the major said loudly, and Paris saw now that he was drunk and must have been well on the way to it when he arrived among them. The surgeon caught Delblanc’s eye across the table and smiled a little and saw the young man’s face break into an answering smile of great warmth and humour, though there was a degree of satire in it too, which he seemed careless to conceal.
‘Your people taught me language,’ the chaplain said. ‘A great gift indeed. And I have profited from it to bless the name of God and that country where of all others his laws are respected, which I never cease from doing day or night. Language, Captain, what a great gift. The word. The Logos. God said, “Let there be light.” Said, sir.’
For some reason he had fastened on Thurso for audience. The captain’s great square cage of a face gave little away, but his eyes had retreated as far as possible back into his head.
‘I do not allow my wife’s vile language to be spoken in my hearing, Captain,’ the chaplain said. ‘I do not permit my children to use it. They speak only English.’
In an attempt to shake off the Reverend Kalabanda’s gaze, Thurso addressed himself to the major, whose face was lowered over his roast duck and sweet potatoes: ‘There has been a fort here for a fair time now, one way or another, sir.’
The major raised his head in the abrupt way of the drunken. He gave the impression of being held in place in his chair only by the stiff brocade of his uniform. ‘Centuries, sir,’ he said. ‘The Portuguese built this fort and held it for a hundred years. Then the Dutch took it off ’em. Then we took it off the Dutch. Then the Danes had a try for it, but naturally they could not prevail against us.’ He reached for his wine with deliberate care. ‘The French came into it somewhere, too,’ he said. ‘I cannot recall exactly where.’ He looked with dazed eyes down the table. ‘Confusion to the French,’ he said, raising his glass.
From the head of the table the Governor was still singing the praises of his chaplain. ‘He has come back here to preach the Gospel in his ancestral lands. His father is Chief Peachy Kalabanda, who is a highly respected figure in these parts.’
‘Yes,’ the vicar said, ‘I have returned to my homeland. I used to run about here as a little child. My father brought me here when he came with slaves to sell. That was in the days of the old company. I used to look up at this great monument, this big white fort. My father used to tell me this was the home of the Great White King.’ Kalabanda smiled and shook his head at the memory. ‘I little thought that one day I would find myself sitting at this table, an ordained priest of the Church of England.’
‘And so it is his home,’ the governor said. He raised a napkin to dab at his pale lips as if to remove pollutant traces. ‘Wherever the flag is planted, there is his home.’
‘I hope he ain’t going about baptizing among the slaves,’ Thurso muttered hoarsely in Paris’s ear. ‘It makes ’em uppish. You persuade a negro he has a soul to be saved and he will be a source of trouble for ever afterwards, to himself and to his owner.’
It is possible that the chaplain’s ears were keen enough to hear something of this, for he smiled again and said, ‘I minister among the troops here and among my free brethren. That there are those who are not free helps me in my ministry. The mind is constituted to accept the god of the more powerful. This we must accept as human nature – and our human nature is given to us by God, so God himself has endowed us with this respect for the powerful. If you have to choose between the god of the slave owner and the god of the enslaved, naturally you will chose the former. All history teaches us that lesson.’
‘It does not teach me that lesson, sir, for one,’ Delblanc said, rather carelessly but with no trace of a smile. ‘Christ spoke to the wretched and powerless as one of them, did he not? I have always understood that the Christian religion was spread among slaves.’
The Reverend Kalabanda leaned forward and Paris saw his nostrils distend slightly. ‘A few ragged-trouser fellows talking in cellars,’ he said with contempt. ‘It was the Roman rulers who spread the faith, governors of provinces like this our governor here, officers of garrisons like our good major, the treasurers and keepers of –’
‘Excuse me, please.’ One of the Scandinavians had come to sudden and unexpected life. He laid down knife and fork and looked with large vague eyes at the eloquent chaplain. ‘A new word we have now, and a new mission. Our mission now is to learn from Africa.’
His colleague nodded. ‘Your efforts, excuse me, they are going in a wrong direction; it is from Africa to Europe that the spirit is flowing and we must open ourselves to receive it. The Church of the West is corrupted, God has declared a last judgement on it. Now is the time of the Fourth Church. We are forerunners, we go in advance to found his Celestial City.’
‘Open ourselves to receive it?’ A broad smile had overspread Kalabanda’s face. ‘The Celestial City?’ he said. ‘Out there in the bush? Excuse me if I laugh. Haw-haw. Have I been ordained into the Anglican Rite and subscribed after much self-questioning to the Thirty-Nine Articles only to come back here and open myself to receive the spirit flowing from people living in mud huts and talking in obscure languages?’
With the mildness of the utterly convinced, the first of the two missionaries began again to speak of God’s plans for Africa. God had promised that the New Jerusalem would be founded among the heathen, and the Africans of the interior had been chosen because they, among the heathen peoples, were the most spiritual …
Under cover of this, Delblanc leaned forward and said in low tones to Paris, ‘I don’t know which is the madder, do you? What are you doing in this Bedlam, may I ask?’
‘I believe it was mentioned to you that I am the ship’s surgeon?’ Paris spoke rather coldly. It was clear to him that Delblanc was a man of birth and education; but his own provincial and rather narrow upbringing had accustomed him to more circumspect modes of address and the lack of ceremony jarred a little on him, his pride suspected there might be some disparagement in it. But the expression of the other’s face was humorous and friendly and his brown eyes were alert with the interest of his question.
‘Well, of course I know that,’ Delblanc said, with a hint of impatience – he was quick and open in all expression of feeling, as Paris was to learn. ‘That doesn’t explain anything. You do not seem to me to be typical, that is why I asked.’
Something extremely youthful, innocent almost, in the confidence of this pronouncement amused Paris suddenly and took the stiffness out of him. Delblanc, who like many enthusiastic persons often amused without intending to, saw the long, patient face opposite him break into a smile of singular sweetness.
‘I have not had time to become typical,’ the surgeon said. ‘I suppose it takes time, doesn’t it? This is my first voyage.’
‘Ah, that is it then.’
The note of disappointment in this, as at some promising line of enquiry frustrated, made Paris smile again. ‘What are you doing here, for that matter?’ he asked, borrowing the other’s directness. ‘I believe you are an artist?’
‘I do not know if I would so dignify it,’ Delblanc said. ‘I can paint a good likeness. Or so I thought.’ A shadow had come to his face. He appeared to reflect a moment or two, then said, half to himself, ‘It occurs to me … I wonder if your captain would agree to take me as a passenger.’
Before Paris had time to answer this, the Governor had risen to his feet, a signal for everyone else at the table to do the same, and remain so until he had left the room, the major by this time relying heavily on the back of his chair for support, and the treasurer, who had said nothing during the meal, also visibly befuddled.
‘Mr Paris,’ Delblanc said quickly, ‘I know we have not been long acquainted, but there is a matter I would dearly like your advice on. I suppose you are staying here tonight? I would be most grateful … I have some rather good brandy in my room.’
Paris hesitated briefly. He had been looking forward to the solitude of his own quarters. But there had been a quality of appeal in Delblanc’s tone, as there was in the clear, ingenuous eyes that now regarded him. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘but I had better make sure first that Captain Thurso has no further need of me.’
Thurso, who had requested half an hour with the Governor after dinner, was ready enough to confirm this; he did so, in fact, with discourteous emphasis. Paris’s presence was increasingly an irritant to him these days. Nevertheless, it was in a spirit of resentment rather than relief that he watched his surgeon’s retreat, the broad-shouldered, awkward form, the tendency to step a little short as if about to alter pace or make some bounding advance which in fact was never made. The man had been no earthly use from the start, merely a source of trouble and vexation …
He was conducted into a small chamber on an upper floor, which the Governor used as an office. Here he was offered brandy, while the Governor himself, now in pale blue robe and round black skull-cap, sipped at a glass of pale fluid. ‘Camomile tea, sir,’ he said with customary languidness. ‘An excellent specific for the digestion. I take a glass of it lukewarm every evening, before retiring for the night. Lukewarm, not too hot – in case you ever feel tempted to try it.’
A small fire was burning in the grate, though the evening was not cold. He had one lit, he explained, in all the apartments he used. ‘To combat the infernal damp that is constantly emanating from the stone,’ he said. ‘Well, sir, how may I be of service to you? I understand from Saunders that you saw the slaves but expressed some reservations.’
‘Reservations.’ The word came gravelled with effort, as if only outrage could have forced it from the reluctant larynx. ‘Sir, I cannot buy the slaves at the prices you are asking. There is no profit for my owner at those prices.’
‘Come now, Captain.’ The Governor spoke with the same nonchalance, but his gaze had sharpened. ‘You know well that there is still profit in it for you. If we were dealing privately together, no doubt I could offer you a lower price. But you must remember the heavy expenses the Company is under in the maintenance of this fort. There is a small army here of clerks, factors, artificers, who all have to have their wages. There is a chaplain. There are the permanent officers of the Company. There is a garrison of a hundred troops, at the Company’s charge for victuals. Allow me also to remind you that you enjoy all the advantages of warehousing here, without a penny of cost. The Company acts as a depot for the goods, they are collected here and wait for you, saving you the trouble and danger of foraging in the unhealthy swamps behind. Moreover, the Company takes care of relations with local chiefs and all intermediaries in the trade, and lays out money to keep them well disposed. But I don’t really need to remind you of this, do I, Captain? You are an old hand.’
‘Yes, sir, I am. Of course I know the Company has expenses. But so they did in the days of your predecessor, and he kept the surcharge to five bars a head. I know these up-country prices – I would be surprised if you were paying more than twenty bars. Your predecessor –’
‘My predecessor died here.’ The Governor’s face was still set in its usual expression of cold composure, but his voice had risen. ‘He lies out there in the graveyard on the hill, with his name cut rough in the stone by a drunken mason. He lasted eighteen months before drink and the climate finished him. It is not my way to explain myself, Captain Thurso, but tonight is perhaps something of an occasion – it is a year to the day since I came out here.’ The Governor paused for some moments, with head raised. ‘That knocking still,’ he said. ‘They are working through the night.’
‘They will have light enough for it,’ Thurso said stolidly. ‘It is a full moon tonight.’
The Governor compressed his lips. There was so little colour in them that only the moulding at the corners indicated the contours of the mouth. Again, in what was clearly a habitual gesture, he dabbed at his face with his handkerchief. ‘A year to the day,’ he said. ‘And apart from some loss of colour and occasional qualms and fluxes, I am as well as ever I was. Sir, I spent everything I had to purchase this post as a Director of the Company. The competition for such positions nowadays is fierce, as I dare say you know. I spent many months soliciting interest on my behalf in London. I had to go to the Jews for the balance of the money, and agree to pay the interest they asked. I have to recover what I have laid out and make my profit while there is time, sir. This climate eats Europeans. War with France could come any day now, with French privateers lying off these coasts, disrupting our trade. You take my meaning? It is a question of time, Captain.’
‘Well, sir,’ Thurso said, ‘it is a question of time for all of us, one way or another. If I am obliged to wait for more favourable prices, some of the slaves already purchased will die on my hands.’ He had no hope now of getting any reduction in the prices; he knew obduracy when he met it, and he had met it now in this slack-wristed, invalidish fellow. But long experience had taught Thurso that an argument is rarely lost completely, if it is persisted in; and certain concessions he was still hoping for. ‘What is to stop us trading independently?’ he said.
The Governor smiled at this, not very pleasantly. ‘There is no independent trade here, my friend,’ he said. ‘Not as far as our writ runs – and it runs far. You have heard no doubt what happened to the Indian Maid? Very sad business. They were attempting to trade privately upriver and were cut off by the natives and two killed and their longboat a total loss. We could do nothing to help them.’
‘I have heard what happened to the Dutchman with the Corymantee negroes aboard.’ Thurso fixed his eyes on the other but could detect no slightest change in the expression of his face.
‘The natives are very loyal here,’ the Governor said, with a return to his more nonchalant manner. ‘They see the Company as their father.’
If Thurso had doubts on this score, he gave no indication of it. After a long moment he said, ‘Well, it seems that I shall have to trade on your terms, sir, if I want to trade at all.’
‘I am glad you take that view, Captain. You will have your pick of the slaves, sir, I can promise you that.’
And it was on this note of harmonious accord between them that Thurso obtained the spoils of the vanquished, which he had all this while, in his dogged and cunning fashion, been pursuing: on the understanding he would take the slaves presently in the dungeons, subject to their being passed as fit, the Governor agreed to let him have eight armed men and two canoes for a week’s absence on private business, the expenses of this to be charged to the Company.
Meanwhile Delblanc had not yet made clear to the surgeon the nature of the advice he was seeking, though both men had made some inroads into the brandy by this time and had grown fairly confidential with each other. The painter occupied a single, square-built chamber, which seemed to have been intended originally as a guard-room. It was high on the ramparts, at the same level as the governor’s quarters, but facing east, away from the sea.
The night was warm and Delblanc’s windows were open; he had stretched squares of fine bobbin-net across them to keep out insects. ‘I carry those nets around with me wherever I go,’ the young man said. ‘I had rather do without a bed than without those.’
Moonlight shone through these precious screens, silvering the mesh, as if to confirm Delblanc’s high estimate. Though earlier wreathed about in cloud, the moon had ridden clear now and hung in the sky, serene and radiant. Blanched pools lay below the casement windows and Delblanc’s shadow fell momentarily across them as he walked to and fro, holding his glass. An array of paints and brushes and jars lay on a low trestle table against one wall. In the centre of the room, masked by a square of pale cloth touched down one edge by moonlight, a canvas stood on an easel.
‘This moonlight is amazing strong,’ Paris said. ‘Strong enough to read by, against the windows. I can hear the sea still, but it does not lie before us, does it?’
‘No, the room looks east, along the coast. I am on the leeward side here – it grows confounded hot during the day. The best quarters are those that get the sea breeze, like those of our esteemed Governor.’ As he spoke Delblanc glanced with a harassed expression at the veiled canvas. ‘As you’d expect,’ he added, running a hand through his thick, already somewhat disordered light brown hair.
‘That is he, isn’t it, under the sheet?’ Paris nodded at the easel.
‘Yes, that is he,’ Delblanc said. However, he made no move to uncover the painting. ‘Have some more brandy,’ he said.
‘I will.’ Waiting for his glass, Paris was struck suddenly by the wonder of existence. He said, ‘It is quiet, but for the waves. I could not tell for a while what the difference was, but it is that – they have stopped their hammering.’
‘What? Ah, no, they will begin again. They need a store of coffins in reserve. You cannot keep corpses long in this climate. For most of the last week they have been at it, practically all the time I have been –’ He broke off, as if struck by some notion. ‘I wonder if that is the reason,’ he said.
‘You will understand when you see the portrait, I think. But I shall need another glass before bringing it to view. Anyway, it is an ill wind that blows no one good. The Reverend Kalabanda has been kept busy with funerals, for which he gets an emolument from the Company.’ Delblanc’s expression of harassment gave way suddenly to a smile. ‘There’s a character for you. That unctuous way he talked about preaching to his free brethren. His free brethren have to listen to his sermons whether they want to or not. They are all in debt to the Company, which makes it a policy to give them drams and goods on credit. The Company could sell them tomorrow to recover the debts and they know it.’
‘Like Tucker,’ Paris said.
‘Who is he?’
‘Oh, he is a mulatto trader on the Sherbro River, where we have just been. He has a big trade connection there and is the principal man of the region. By advancing credit he puts people in fear of him and so gets everyone in his power.’
‘Well, it is common practice,’ Delblanc said, ‘and not only in Africa. Though one sees it in a pure form here, not so much shrouded with hypocrisy. One sees the sacredness of money.’ He passed a hand through his hair again. His eyes were light hazel in colour, very large in the iris and set rather shallow; with the clear, high forehead they gave to the whole face a sincerity almost disturbing in its nakedness and absence of concealment – and greatly at odds with the gentlemanly offhandedness of his manner. He was smiling slightly now but his expression was unhappy and rather bitter. ‘Money is sacred, as everyone knows,’ he said. ‘So then must be the hunger for it and the means we use to obtain it. Once a man is in debt he becomes a flesh and blood form of money, a walking investment. You can do what you like with him, you can work him to death or you can sell him. This cannot be called cruelty or greed because we are seeking only to recover our investment and that is a sacred duty. Still, the negroes are not much worse off than the whites, from what Saunders tells me. He is one of the factors here.’
‘Yes, we met this afternoon. He took us to see the slaves. He did not look in good health to me.’
‘He will die if he does not get away from here. He would leave if he could, while he still has some chance of recovering his health, but he cannot – the Company has got him as fast as if he were in chains. Seventy-five pounds a year sounds well enough in Leadenhall Street. But when he got out here he found that it was paid in crackra.’
‘What is that?’
‘It is a kind of false currency that can only be used in the Company stores – at Company prices. It is all Saunders can do to buy cankey, palm oil and a little fish to keep himself alive. For other necessaries he has to go into debt. And the others are all in the same case. I tell you, they are all a company of white negroes here and it is the same in the other trading forts I have been in. The only ones who do well out of it are the high officials of the Company.’
He glanced again, involuntarily it seemed, at the veiled portrait on the easel. ‘If they live long enough, that is. Death is good for my business as well as Kalabanda’s. Or the threat of it, at least. There is nothing like the shadow of mortality for inclining a man to have his portrait painted. But what the sitter pays for, Mr Paris, is the promise of life. Just take a look at this, sir.’
Delblanc finished what was left in his glass and moved towards the easel. After a final moment of hesitation he threw back the cover.
‘Good heavens!’ Paris exclaimed. Whatever he had expected it had not been this. ‘What have you done to him?’
The likeness was remarkable: the artist had perfectly caught the high-bridged, disdainful nose, the languid eyelids; but the eyes were fixed, the bloodless mouth frozen in avarice and the whole face stark with ultimate composure. It was a mask of death that looked at him.
‘Now do you see what I mean?’ Delblanc spoke as if making a point in an argument. ‘A man who lives in perpetual fear of dissolution, who is for ever dosing himself and taking his own pulse, and I have depicted him as a death’s head. It only happened in these last two days. The portrait was finished, or so I thought, he had done his sittings. I was intending only some finishing touches, heighten the flesh tones, ennoble the expression and so on, the usual embellishments, you know. Then, I don’t know how it happened, a touch here, a touch there, the line of the mouth, the set of the eyes, and this face emerged under my brush. And I can’t bring myself to change it – it is the truth of the man, and something more than that. But of course he won’t like it.’
‘No,’ conceded Paris, ‘he won’t like it.’ He felt a little lightheaded, after the wine at dinner and the brandy now, and the lapping light and shadow in the room, and this staring, moon-touched portrait of a stricken miser. ‘He won’t like it at all,’ he said.
‘And if he doesn’t like it,’ Delblanc pursued, with a sort of gloomy logic, ‘he won’t take it, and if he doesn’t take it, he won’t pay. But it’s not really that – I’m not short of money for the moment. No, but you see, he could make things devilish unpleasant for me, if he wanted, and he would want, I feel sure.’ Delblanc gestured at the portrait. ‘You only need look at his face to see that. I could find myself in the dungeons on some trumped-up charge. We are a long way from home and justice is a relative concept at the best of times. Three degrees of latitude reverses the whole of jurisprudence … It was Pascal said that, wasn’t it? I don’t feel like taking the risk. It is for that reason I thought of taking passage with you.’
‘As to that,’ Paris said, ‘I think it would be best if you deal direct with Thurso himself. My recommendation would not dispose him in your favour, quite the contrary.’
Delblanc nodded. ‘He did not appear very fond of you. My purse, such as it is, will best recommend me to the captain. He will take me, I have no doubt of it. It is not only to save my skin I want to get away.’
He paused to replenish the surgeon’s glass and his own. ‘To be quite frank,’ he said – and it was difficult to imagine his ever being much else – ‘I am fair sick of what I am doing and assisting in here. I have had to paint a good number of faces in order to get to this one. For eighteen months now I have been painting likenesses of company officials and agents and resident merchants up and down from James Fort to Elmina, not only English, but Dutch and French too. And now I have come upon their collective face. It is no accident that it has sprung out under my brush. Since I came to this coast I have seen things and heard of things, Paris, that I will take to the grave with me. The ships come and trade on the edges. You may think only the edges are fouled with this trade but it is not so. The flood of cheap manufactures, for which the people have no need, destroys their industries. They become dependent on this trade and the demand for goods can only be met by enslaving their fellows. To do this they need muskets in ever increasing quantities – which we supply. And so we spread death everywhere. But that sacred hunger we spoke of justifies all. The trade is lawful, they say, and that is enough. Well, it is not enough for me. That face on the easel is the face of plunder and death, sir, it is the face of Europe in Africa. It is an unacceptable face to me, sir, and I cannot go on any longer painting it. I have come to the end of portraits, on this coast at least. A man can hold off the truth of things for purposes of making a living – that is legitimate, I suppose, though ignoble. But when the face is there, before your eyes … It cannot simply be expunged, d’you see, as if it had never existed, not when heart and mind have worked together to produce it.’
‘Heart and mind,’ Paris repeated, struck by this simple and unaffected yoking of the two. Once again he was aware of some essential ingenuousness in the painter, a quality of innocence that had survived the wandering and makeshift life. He encountered the transfixed and horrendous stare of the face in the portrait. Moonlight lay along the pallid temples, revived a gleam of avarice in the dead left eye.
‘Yes,’ the painter said, with the same eagerness. ‘To make a good likeness you must have heart and mind working together. But the heart comes first.’
‘The heart is a vital organ,’ Paris said, in his serious and slightly pedantic way. ‘But it is a faulty guide to conduct. It is the mind makes judgements and comparisons, furnishes evidence on which ideas of truth can be founded.’
‘I take an opposite view,’ Delblanc said excitedly. ‘No man will ever find virtue by the mind alone – to think so was the folly of the Greeks. This trade we are helping in our different ways – do you think it comes about through the dictates of the heart?’
‘Nor truly of the mind either, but greed can take that colouring, as can other vices.’
‘Yes, sir, and so our natural instincts are perverted. Do you think for a moment that men would enslave one another if they lived in a state of nature?’
‘Well, it is a large question,’ Paris said doubtfully. ‘And one that cannot be easily answered.’
‘You are right. Let us have some more brandy now, so that we can the better discuss it.’
Whether it was Delblanc’s precipitation of speech or his readiness to forget his troubles at the prospect of debate, Paris did not quite know, but there was something about this eagerness that moved him now with a mingled sense of comedy and pain. Quite suddenly, with that lonely urgency that comes at times to reticent natures, he wanted to entrust something to this man, so frank and unaffected, so unforced in his transitions from thought and sensation to speech. ‘We can discuss it if you like,’ he said, ‘but there is something I wanted to say before and didn’t. You spoke about the need to make a living and how it inclines us to evade the truth of things, but I have not even that excuse.’
‘But it is your livelihood, as I understand the matter. I suppose you do not offer your services free?’
‘I did not need to take my uncle’s offer,’ Paris said. ‘My uncle is the owner of the ship I am serving on. I could have gone to another part of England or to one of the colonies. I could have gone to America, where there is need for doctors.’
‘You needed to get away then?’
The gentle matter-of-factness of this brought a tightness to Paris’s throat that he had not anticipated. Those confiding their pain cannot know at the outset how much they will be required to relive it; but he knew that he was set on a course here, in this room from which the moonlight was receding, leaving it darker, before a man he hardly knew and a face of death. ‘Yes,’ he said harshly, ‘I needed to get away, but I did not need to take a post on a slaveship, I did not need to use my profession, of which I was proud once, to certify people as fit for branding and chaining.’
‘I suppose you thought it didn’t much matter,’ Delblanc said, in the same tone of gentle simplicity. ‘What you did with yourself, I mean.’
At this the surgeon rose in his turn and began pacing to and fro across the room. ‘It never mattered what I did, as far as only myself was concerned,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t matter now. I don’t care what becomes of me. But I had no right … I should not have argued in favour of the mind just now, that was only for argument’s sake – I still have that vice. It was my insistence on opinion, concealed under the appearance of a desire for truth, that ruined me and killed my wife. Yes, sir, killed her.’ Paris nodded fiercely, as if he thought the other might attempt to contradict him. ‘By my arrogant folly I killed her and the child she was carrying.’ He paused to drink what was left in his glass, though hardly aware of the action.
‘We lived in Norfolk,’ he said, ‘where I practised as a surgeon-apothecary. I became interested in fossil remains and what they can tell us about the age of the earth, and also in the evidence of rises and falls of the earth’s surface through long ages of time. I began to form a collection of marine fossils, some of them found high above the level of the sea. The existence of these cannot be reconciled with the account of creation given to us in the Bible. So far, if it had been a mere question of my private studies, all would have been well. There are men of science all over Europe quietly forming their opinions on such matters. But I, sir, I had to air my discoveries and opinions. I acquired a printing press and issued pamphlets in which I championed the views of Maupertuis. Perhaps you are acquainted with his work?’
‘Not even with his name, I am afraid,’ Delblanc said. ‘I have not taken much interest in such matters.’
‘He is a man of genius.’ Despite his distress, Paris’s tone had quickened with admiration for this hero of his youth. ‘His name has been obscured by misapprehension and envy, but one day his worth will be known. By his investigations into heredity he has shown how, from two individuals only, the multiplication of the most dissimilar species could grow, owing their origin to some accidental formation, an error you could say, each error creating a new species …’
‘But that would mean that we ourselves are the result of error also, that we need not have been as we are.’
‘Yes, some different accidents might have occurred. Or so Maupertuis would say. Something impossible to imagine … I was greatly struck by these ideas when first I read them; they seemed to offer an explanation of the diversity of creatures, something which had always puzzled me. And they confirmed my own conclusions about the age of the earth, because such changes would have needed great periods of time to accomplish.’
Paris paused, swallowing at some impediment. ‘Great periods of time,’ he repeated, in a voice that trembled slightly – they were dear to his memory, these early studies and speculations, his desk in the lamplight, Ruth busy somewhere not far. ‘I published these theories,’ he went on after a moment. ‘They run counter to orthodox opinion and especially to the teachings of the Church. I was warned, not only by those who were hostile, but by friends and colleagues. Yes, I was well warned. But I paid no heed.’ Paris stopped his pacing and stood still in the centre of the room, looking fixedly at Delblanc, who sat out of the candle-light, his face in shadow. ‘I was clad in the armour of truth,’ the surgeon said. ‘Or so I thought. Or so I pretended to think.’ He tried to smile but failed. ‘In fact, I was merely obstinate and overweening, vices which I have still. I was arrested on a complaint of the Bishop of Norwich. The judge was in the Church Interest. He found me guilty of issuing a seditious publication, imposed a fine beyond my means and consigned me to prison until it was paid. My uncle redeemed the debt when he learned of it, but while I lay in prison a mob set on by the Church Party broke into my house with a view to smashing the press and in the course of this they terrified my wife so that she miscarried. She was not a strong woman and she did not recover. I did not see her die …’
These unguarded negatives broke the control which he had struggled to maintain by an appearance of reporting on facts. ‘She died without me,’ he said, and his voice broke on it. He saw the artist make a sudden movement, as if to rise and come towards him. He said quickly, ‘You would serve me best by staying as you are. I do not know why, for the life of me, but I am set on speaking to you as I have spoke to no one else, and I need a distance between us if I am to get through to the end.’
For some moments, however, he was obliged to remain silent, checking the tears that had threatened him at Delblanc’s impulse to kindness. The hardest part still lay before him. Below the acknowledgement of blame, below the self-reproach, at the deepest level of confession, lay the words that would express the shame of what had been done to him. It was characteristic of Paris that he should seek a way to it through argument. ‘You quoted Pascal just now,’ he said. “ ‘Three degrees of latitude reverses the whole of jurisprudence.” Delblanc, no latitude makes any difference to what men will do to other men, whether for gain or in the name of justice. Publishing seditious material is a felony in our law. Before I began my prison sentence, they set me twelve hours in the pillory. In our enlightened land, for publishing the view that the earth is older than six thousand years, and thus contradicting Revelation, I was chained by the legs to a post, my head and hands were stuck through a board and clamped there and I was left to the mercies of the crowd for a night on the market square of Norwich. Pilloried alongside with me there was a man who had been convicted of sodomy. Fortunate for me, because he diverted the wrath of the mob and so I was saved from injury at their hands. He was stoned by the whores of the town. In the morning, when they came for us, he was insensible – I do not know to this day whether he lived or died.’
Paris’s voice was unhesitating now; the droning fluency of nightmare had descended on him. As he spoke he had the sense of a steady seepage of filth and blood, a stain that spread with his words in this quiet room, with no check to him in Delblanc’s motionless figure or the hideous silence of the governor, and only the distant booming of the sea for admonition. The festering restraint of months fell away from him and the agony of his humiliation returned, licensed, almost welcomed, that crouching, ludicrous, beast-like posture, the terrible exposure of the naked face and head, detached from the rest of the body, offered like a pumpkin at a fair for the crowd to shy at, the hanging head and meek hands of the sodomist, his face and hair all pulped and bloody, like a burst pumpkin, lolling there, still unable to retract his head from his tormentors, his pleading mercy made indistinct by the blood that had filled his mouth …
He checked himself at last and a deep gasp like a sob broke from him. ‘Legitimate means of livelihood? The face of truth that cannot be denied? I wanted to look them in the face, when they came to release me in the morning. I had prepared myself. But I could not stand upright, I was led away crouching still, with back bent like some submissive animal. And yet I came here. I knew what it is to be shackled and derided and still I came. How can that be forgiven?’
Another groan came from him. Humiliation almost worse than that grey morning’s, the knowledge of his folly, to think that despair can exonerate, that the desire of death can remove the burden of conscience … ‘And it is not even true,’ he said turning half blindly and moving to the window as if for some refuge in the night outside. ‘It was not true then and is not now.’
The moon was high and clear of cloud, astoundingly radiant, eclipsing the stars. Moonlight gleamed in a sheet of silver over the marshes and flats of mud they had crossed to come here, so cluttered and tawdry by day, all unified and resplendent now as if lying under some momentary blessing. And for a moment this transforming moonlight was confused in Paris’s mind with the sunlight of earlier, the form of the woman edged with fire against the bars. ‘It is not even true that I want to die,’ he said, and with this ultimate confession he saw the moonlit levels run together and glimmer, as if washed in some thin solution of silver, and then blur to bright webs, as the tears, held long in check, came freely now to his eyes.