There was much to see to, but not so much as he had feared. It is when we make plans for an absence that we learn the extent to which we are needed at home. A good deal of business had to be left in the hands of the junior partner, Andrews; but Erasmus’s secretary was entirely familiar with the workings of the firm and could be trusted to guide and advise. The old man, Fletcher, was still active and hard-headed enough; he grumbled at having more to do, but made no real objection. Someone was found to deputize at meetings of the Association. Many of the members had holdings in the West Indies, so prolonged absence from London was not uncommon.
There was the chartering of a ship to see to and letters of introduction had to be obtained for Colonel Campbell, the recently appointed governor of Florida. None of this presented much in the way of difficulty, but it took time. While waiting, he informed himself as far as he could about this new Colony, acquired by accident almost: Spain had handed her over some two and a half years previously to buy back her jewel of Cuba, taken by the English fleet. It seemed that what Philips had said of her was largely true. The Spanish had never much valued the possession, except as safeguarding their trade routes from Mexico and the Caribbean. They had done little to develop the territory or even to explore it. It offered nothing, after all, to anyone’s notions of usefulness. The southern part was an uncharted, subtropical wilderness. There was no gold or silver to be found there and any Indians that were captured soon died when enslaved, a fact that greatly reduced their value. During the latter part of the recent colonial wars, the Spanish had scarcely ventured from their capital of St Augustine in the north, penned in by the warlike Creek Indians, who had been incited and supplied with arms by the English in Georgia. It was with the main task of pacifying these Creeks and assuring them of English gratitude that Campbell had been sent there. Or such, at least, was the declared policy. Privately Erasmus was given to understand that the expressions of gratitude would be accompanied by appropriations of traditional Creek hunting grounds to offer to English settlers.
Harvey, meanwhile, kept to his side of the bargain and behaved well. Metamorphosed into a superior servant, in a suit of good cloth and paste buckles to his shoes and his hair dressed in a pigtail, he entertained his fellow-domestics with stories of the sea and aroused the beginnings of tenderness in the cook. He could still hardly believe his luck. He had entered a world where anything could happen. His new master was rich, the rich had unaccountable fancies – and Harvey was glad of it.
Erasmus found a certain kind of happiness in this period of planning. His cause was just: a wrong had been done, and the perpetrators of it might be living still, while his own father had lain underground these twelve years. He said nothing of this, however, to anyone at all. To his associates, as to his wife and father-in-law, he explained the voyage as a business venture. This was plausible enough. Florida was a new Colony, it was His Majesty’s declared policy to encourage settlement by assisted passages and grants of land. Many could be expected to take advantage of this, there was certain to be a demand for manufactured goods.
‘I shall form useful connections up there in St Augustine,’ Erasmus said to his father-in-law. ‘This new Colony is a potential market of very great importance, I believe. Those who strike while the iron is hot will get the best share of it.’
‘Do you seriously think that Florida colonists will buy their sugar from us and pay the tariffs when they have Havana just across the water?’ Sir Hugo looked without friendliness at Erasmus from under white, dishevelled eyebrows. ‘You must have taken leave of your senses,’ he said.
Erasmus met the old man’s gaze with unconcealed antagonism. He had always been impatient of opposition but of late years, with all his opinions confirmed by increasing wealth – that infallible testimony – any slightest criticism drove him to anger. ‘I was not talking of sugar,’ he said coldly. ‘Do you think there is naught but sugar in this world? Do you think people wear sugar on their backs or turn the earth with it? And if it is madness we are talking of, what is this indiscriminate buying of negroes but madness? I am reliably informed that your factors in Kingston are buying men with no mouth left and women with dugs to their knees, and keeping them all in compounds with nothing to do.’
‘The compensation we receive from the government will take no account of sick or whole, it will be paid on the number of heads and calculated on current prices.’
‘Compensation?’ Erasmus affected a look of frigid puzzlement. ‘Whence comes this notion? Some incubus must have visited your sleep.’
‘They are going to abolish the trade. It is coming, I tell you, there is a bill preparing now. I have it on authority.’
‘A parcel of clerks and petty fellows that hang about the ministries and sell information by the shilling,’ Erasmus said with contempt. It was hardly believable that Jarrold should give credence to such stories. He was a man whose shrewdness and ruthlessness were legendary, who had risen from lawyer’s clerk to merchant banker and amassed a fortune on the way – he was worth half a million at least. In a lifetime of trading he had scarcely touched anything that did not turn to profit. And to be visited now with this quite unfounded but unshakeable fear of the abolitionists, which was like enough to ruin him. No, not fear, more like a need, something he was seeking. The intervention of God, perhaps … It was an unusual kind of thought for Erasmus and he was uneasy at it – uneasy and perplexed: his father-in-law’s career had after all been highly meritorious in its single-minded pursuit of wealth. Even now, in the shadow of this Apocalypse of his own creating, the old man was trying to realize a profit …
‘You will lose by it,’ Erasmus said. ‘A negro is valuable only in terms of the work that can be got out of him in the period immediately after purchase. He is not a capital asset, the merchandise is too perishable. It is not like cattle, you cannot breed him for profit. This movement for abolition of the trade is a chimera, there will be no bill, there are no voices against it but some few members of the Quaker Faction and one or two meddling fools outside parliament. But it is useless to talk to you.’
The money being thus squandered might have ultimately come down to him through his wife. He had thought at one stage of trying to have the old man declared incompetent, but apart from this particular mania he seemed rational enough. The only thing to be hoped was that he might die soon and so limit the damage. Erasmus’s own money at least was not in any danger. He had given instructions for his twelve per cent holding in the bank to be quietly sold in small lots while the stock was still high.
His farewells to his wife on the day of departure were scant in the extreme. He was embarking that evening, the coach was waiting below with Harvey and the baggage already inside. He had to wait while Marie announced him: his wife had lately decided, or been told by one of her friends, that too much ease of access between married persons was vulgar.
As he entered Fritz the poodle yapped at him as usual from its cushion and showed its pink gums. A travestied and unrecognizable woman in a peach-coloured gown, her features concealed behind a mask of greyish, pimpled skin, reclined on a sofa in the dressing-room adjacent to the bedchamber. ‘Is it you, Margaret?’ he said, advancing. ‘What in God’s name is that on your face?’
‘It is a chicken skin,’ she replied in a voice slightly obscured. ‘I am advised by my friend Lady Danby that it is the non plus ultra for restoring one’s complexion.’ The ragged fringe of skin round her mouth moved with the movement of her lips. ‘It has to be a freshly killed bird so as to be moist enough.’
‘So your husband, who is to be away several months, is to make his farewells to a chicken skin.’
‘I cannot see why you should need to look at my face just because you are going away, when you take such small interest in it while we are under the same roof. This must be kept in place for an hour at least, so Lady Danby says, if it is to do anything.’
‘Lady Danby is little better than a whore and I am sorry to hear you call her friend,’ Erasmus said. ‘I cannot wait that long, we are sailing with the tide.’ He took her listless hand and kissed it. ‘I hope you will take care of your health,’ he said. ‘Your complexion, I see, is in no danger of neglect.’
In the coach, as they jolted past Tower Bridge, it occurred to Erasmus that his wife must have donned the chicken skin shortly before his visit, though she had known he was coming. She had wanted to conceal herself. Her complaint against him had some truth in it: on the occasions, rare enough now, when they slept together, he did not look much at her face; at all other times when they met she was masked or disguised in some way, with fard and rouge and patches or with some charlatan lotion. It came to him that he almost never saw Margaret’s real face. He wondered if he would recognize her passing in the street, or in the midst of a crowd … There was one face he would know instantly, after twelve years or twenty, the green eyes, so pale as to seem like some solution of silver, the deeply marked brows, the patience and obstinacy of the expression … With a sudden rush of detestation Erasmus realized that he knew this face of Matthew Paris more intimately than that of any other person in the world.
It was a face that returned frequently to him during the voyage, accompanied always by further remembered details of his cousin’s appearance and manner, this process resembling a story he repeated to himself, more elaborate with every repetition. But wherever the story began it ended always in the same place, with those stronger arms lifting him, swinging him away, violating his body and his will. He had uttered no sound, submitting in furious silence, making himself a dead weight in his cousin’s arms …
He recalled Paris’s appearance on that last visit, the gaunt and awkward frame, the thick wrists and clumsy-seeming hands that were yet so precise in their smallest movements, the deep voice with the odd vibration in it and the sardonic, lop-sided smile. There had been that disturbing suggestion of physical power, of imperfect control …
The possibility that this face, this bundle of attributes, should have continued in being all this while, surviving his father’s ruin, his own loss of love and home and all the long struggle to pay off his father’s debts, was something he found difficult at first to endure. That the survival had been achieved by such heinous crimes – murder, piracy, the theft not only of the negroes but of the ship itself and then only to abandon her – made it the more monstrous. The thought that his cousin might be alive still was literally monstrous to him, a shape of ugliness and deformity in the natural order of things, something to be extirpated. It subverted all the rules that men lived by. If such wrong-doing was allowed to succeed, what price duty, what price honour? What price his own faithful discharge of obligation to the family name?
But as the days at sea followed one another in monotonous succession, with the wash of waves against the ship’s bows and the slow creaking of her timbers, he found himself in the strengthening grip of paradox. The less Paris seemed deserving of liberty and life, the more Erasmus found himself hoping that he was still in possession of these, so that he could be brought to justice and deprived of both together. For the other miscreants who had been aboard, whom Paris had doubtless persuaded to join him, Erasmus cared little. They were scum in any case. But his thoughts tended always to a passionate preservation of his cousin’s life, until the fear that he was not there, that he might not be able to be found, even that the whole story might still prove to be a fabrication, set him burning with a fever of anxiety as he lay sleepless on his narrow bunk, rocked tirelessly by this barren mother who could give him no security, no relief. The chafing of the sheets brought him to sexual arousal sometimes, a mechanical tension that was like a transference of his tense will. At these times he brought himself to a cold release and lay empty, waiting for dawn.
As the leagues mounted between himself and what he had left, the years fell away, became unreal, and he returned to the elemental feelings of childhood. His life dwindled to one intense focus, of such simplicity and power that it reduced the rest to shadows. This falling away was like the slow dismantling of a scaffolding that had never been necessary; but he could not discern the structure it had supported, or seemed to support – that too was an illusion. There was the intense and brilliant focus of his resolve. Outside of this little was visible to him. The blankness of sky and ocean seemed evidence only of more stripping away. But in lieu of possession and identity there was the notion of justice, which deepened and grew abstract and religious, renewed every day in the promise of the dawn, confirmed by the simple sunlight, solemnized by the approach of the dark.
Harvey he questioned from time to time and always closely, as if intent to find him out in some contradiction; but the seaman’s story was too simple for that, and at the same time too vague. Harvey had no picture in his mind of the route that had led him to the creek. He had blundered on to it. ‘I had taken drink, sir,’ he said, always with the same expression, wry and philosophical, as befitted references to this common accident of the human condition. He could remember, so he said, the watering place and the general lie of the coast where they had anchored. And indeed he felt pretty sure of this, though apprehensive of failure; he knew his master well enough by now not to relish the thought of disappointing him.
However, he was not a man who worried overmuch and he was otherwise enjoying the voyage mightily: it was the first time in his life that he had been at sea without having to sweat at the ropes. He messed with the steward and other crew members exempted from watch and regaled them with extraordinary stories about the world of fashion into which he had been introduced. His own simple wonder disarmed his listeners and he was popular with everyone aboard.
The same wonder governed his relations with his employer. That a man with a fine house and servants and money – in short, everything he needed in life – should want to go halfway round the world merely to look at a stinking hulk in a creek bed was so far from reasonable, so opaque to normal understanding, that it placed Kemp on a different level of humanity altogether, lordly, superbly unaccountable, needing to be humoured like the mad.
This humouring Harvey took seriously, conceiving it his duty, part of the terms of his engagement. His story gained in fluency and dramatic colouring without acquiring much more in the way of substance. It was also refined in the direction of virtue: someone else had drawn off the rum from the ship’s stores, someone else again had been for trying to catch the women. To the discovery itself he could add little. The elements after all were few: the drink, the headlong chase, the stumbling through the mangrove swamp, the curving bank of the channel and the tilted wreck lying there amid the debris of her masts, the vegetation trailing over her from the banks on either side. Sometimes he added details. ‘She was a slaveship,’ he said once. ‘I been on slavers. There was the remains of the bulkheads markin’ off the rooms.’
At the same time he tried to defend himself against possible mistake. ‘That bit of coast,’ he said, ‘it never looks the same. Sometimes it an’t even the coast you are seein’. You see what looks like land but it is only shapes of mist built up on the horizon and they disappears as you come closer in.’
As they passed through the Santaren Channel and out into the Florida Stream, these words came to seem prophetic. They struck a season of wandering and irregular mists, warm air above the current meeting with colder on the edges. Through these they loitered for some days with the low green shapes of the Keys, glimpsed intermittently on the port side, vivid and brief enough to seem like hallucinations.
Anxious to avoid the shoals to eastwards, the captain kept in mid-channel until they were north of the Great Bahama Bank, then approached the Florida coast at the rough latitude of the Boca Nueva – the only landmark Philips had supplied and so far invisible in the continuing mists. He did not dare go in too close. The only charts they had were Spanish, well drawn enough but not to be relied on, the configuration of the coast in this south-eastern part having undergone constant change as the sea nibbled at it. ‘It is like a flobby old prick hangin’ down, gettin’ wore away all the time,’ Harvey remarked in a moment of gloom to the steward, after studying the map of the peninsula. ‘With poxy Spanish names on it, which no Christian can read.’ He could not read in any language, but this did not lessen his sense of aggrievement.
However, next morning they woke to clear weather and a succession of fine days followed. They drew closer to the coast, and made gradual way northwards with the current, scanning the shore as they went. Towards noon on the second day of this they sighted the green mouth of the entrada, with its long, curving sand bar on the north side, where the sea broke white in the shape of a sickle, just as Philips had described. They anchored in ten fathoms and the shore party put out in the punt with provisions for two days, Erasmus, Harvey and six of the crew armed with musket and cutlass.
It was a day of clear sunshine, almost windless. The shore and the scrub beyond were completely deserted. Low waves broke on the sand with scarcely any sound at all. Erasmus was never to forget the sense of terrible incongruity that descended on him as he stepped out of the boat on to the white sand and felt the peace of the place settle round him.
Before him the beach sloped gently upwards to a fringe of motionless palms. A flock of birds with black wings and white faces and crimson, blade-like bills rose and flew out to sea, keeping low over the water, making no sound. Here, he thought, or somewhere not far, perhaps on a day like this one, the fugitives had made landfall. It was hardly possible to believe it. There was no print of man anywhere to be seen.
He began to walk up the beach. Feeling firm ground under his feet, he staggered slightly, after the weeks at sea. But the unsteadiness seemed to him due more to the shock of this hush that lay over everything. He came to a stop, glancing in something like bewilderment along the empty shore, with nothing in his mind but his own loneliness and the incongruous violence of his intentions.
Such faltering was unusual and it did not last long. If anything, his resolution was strengthened by the difficulties that followed. It emerged that Harvey could not immediately locate the place where they had watered. He would know it when he saw it, he said, in an attempt to deflect his employer’s wrath. But he could see nothing directly before him, here on the shoreline, to indicate which direction it lay in.
Since all he knew for sure was that the place lay south of the inlet, Erasmus judged it best to take the point of their landing as central and seek north and south from it along the coast. Creeks there were in plenty, running into the wetlands behind the shore; but they were not the streams of Harvey’s memory. It took two days of casting thus, with their escort now openly surly at being made to row long hours in the sun, before they came upon the stretch of slightly higher, rockier shore scattered with pines that Philips had described and Harvey now recognized.
The springs were here right enough – there was fresh water below the ground over a wide area, emerging in pools among the rocky scrub. As if to compensate for his failure before, Harvey led now without hesitation, skirting the pools, plunging into the mangrove thickets that grew beyond them. Sweating profusely, stumbling among the intricate roots of the trees, sometimes floundering knee-deep in swamp, they kept a rough course between the shore and a chain of small brackish lagoons that ran parallel to it.
The mouth of the creek, when they came to it, was dark as a cavern, roofed over with branches. There was no more than a foot or two of water in it, almost black and quite still, half choked in places with spreads of heavily scented, hyacinth-like flowers. Keeping as close as possible to the bank, they followed the channel as it wound inland. A crocodile, which had been sunning itself in a break among the trees, slithered without apparent haste down the bankside, broke the dark water into brief glitters and disappeared among a tangle of bushes. The creek began a wide curve away from the sea. Quite unexpectedly, following this round, they came upon the ship.
She lay where the retreating water had left her, keel embedded in the mud bottom. In settling she had leaned heavily to port and the refuse of her decks had piled against the gunwales on that side. Creepers had found their way over her bows and clothed the ruined trellis of the forecastle railing. Drapes of pale green moss like horses’ tails had lowered on to her from the trees that arched overhead. Thick-stemmed vines had lassoed the stumps of her masts. Only the upper slope of her quarterdeck was left bare. She was tied down here, bound by the lacing of creepers, a rotting captive in this forgotten channel.
From somewhere on the opposite bank Erasmus heard the sudden chattering cry of a bird. The smell of salt, mud and vegetable decomposition came to him, and the smell of the softened, worm-riddled timbers of the ship. He walked forward until he came level with her bows. There was the Duchess of Devonshire, eyeless and cracked and faded now, and her bosom crumbling, but still yearning forward in her pinions. She was turned away towards the farther bank: some distant ebb had tugged the ship athwart the stream. Boarding would be easier by the stern, he decided, where she was closer up. ‘I want no one with me,’ he said. ‘You men will wait here. Space out along the bank and keep a watch.’
These words came as a disappointment to Harvey, who had hoped to accompany his master aboard. He had convinced himself that there was something of immense value on the ship, which only Kemp knew about, this being the only thing he could think of that could explain what they were doing there. All he got in the event, however, was mud on his back from Erasmus’s boots. The ship’s side was rather far for a leap, especially as she was tilted so awkwardly. Too impatient to wait for a bridge to be made, Erasmus swung over to the stern post by means of a rope, using Harvey’s back as a launching pad. Taking advantage of the footholds afforded by the carving of the quarterheads, he climbed up over the side, encountering as he did so the raddled, reproachful stare of the Merchant, still in periwig and cocked hat, still with hectic traces of red in his cheeks. Above this, affording an excellent toe-hold, was the scroll of the City of Liverpool in blistered gilt.
A final effort brought him on to the deck. Here he stood clear in the sunshine. He heard faint scuttling sounds from among the warm boards. A delicately fronded, fern-like plant grew thickly amidst the burst planking of the deck where the rotted wood had mixed with leaf mould and drifted dust to make a soil. With a small shock of surprise he heard the humming of bees from somewhere and moments later two tiny, buff-coloured birds flew up out of this undergrowth and disappeared among the foliage on the opposite bank.
He began to make his way forward, moving crabwise along the slope of the deck. A debris of broken staves and a section of mast lay over the after-hatch, too heavy for him to lift aside. He went on towards the main hatchway. He saw a snake, dandified as only the very venomous can be, in bands of red and black and yellow, go slithering across some feet of open deck and disappear below a pile of broken casks and scraps of cordage.
He drew the cutlass at his side and went forward. The intensity of his purpose was near to choking him now. He would have braved any danger to get below and find his cousin’s cabin, though what he expected to see there he did not know.
The hatchway was open, though partly grown over with bindweed. The stairs were in place, leading down. At the foot he began to make his way aft again, leaning awkwardly against the portside bulkhead to keep his balance against the tilt. Shafts of light came through from the gaps in the planking overhead. Some yards along he found a skull and a scattering of bones, part of the ribcage still in its hoop. Had Philips mentioned human remains on the ship? He could not remember. An adult this, but whether black or white it was not possible to determine. Hardly big enough to belong to Paris … There were two more skeletons, one of them a child’s, lying a little further, at an angle to the bulkhead.
The discovery, his aloneness in these unaccustomed surroundings, took all guard from his thoughts. As he stood in this dim, cluttered place, he could not defend himself against the knowledge that there had been terrible suffering here, in the heart of the ship; it was as though the timbers gave off the odour of it. It had survived this ruin, would survive the dust the ship was destined to …
This was no more than an aberration, a brief deflection of purpose. Next moment he was shuffling on again, through the broken sunlight. He had been over the vessel often enough with his father to remember where the surgeon’s quarters lay, but the dimensions of the cabin were not so easy to make out now; the light inner bulkhead had fallen in, as if from some splintering blow. There was a litter of old yarn and bits of tackle that had jolted down here with the tilt of the ship. But the frame of the bunk was still there, loose at the foot where it had swung free from the splintered partition.
Erasmus kicked at the rubbish, dislodged a rusted band of iron and some pieces of curved wood, saw beneath these a curled shape, a snake he thought at first, then saw it was part of a belt. He picked it up. The leather had rotted and the buckle was missing, perhaps cut off. It was narrow – not a seaman’s belt. He began to look about him with more purpose. Below where the planking had buckled and split he found a glass stopper with a round lid, of the type apothecaries use for small bottles and phials. This mark of his cousin’s presence was as precious to him as a token of love and he pocketed it with care. However, apart from a small china inkwell, he found nothing more of any interest. It was clear that the cabins had been diligently picked over, and probably more than once.
On the point of leaving, obscurely disappointed, he pushed with a sort of vindictive violence against the frame of the bunk. He felt the head of it swing heavily round, then check against the splintered bulkhead. There was some obstruction there, something reinforcing the partition. Forcing the frame as far as possible from the wall, he saw a small cavity there, which had perhaps been fronted with panelling or some light veneer. He could see nothing inside, there was not light enough, and he was unwilling to put his hand where his eye could not follow it. He found a piece of wood and poked with it in the cavity. His stick encountered some object there that took up nearly all the space. When he reached in, his fingers touched the side of a wooden box.
It seemed to him afterwards that he had known from the first touch what this box would be, so that when he drew it out there was no surprise, only a sense of confirmation. The lacquer was roughened and pitted, but the resinous varnish had held off the damp and the gold and blue design of peacocks on the lid was as clear now in this narrow space where he stood as it had been the afternoon thirteen years ago when amid the tea-cups and the talk of her ailments his mother had made a present of it to Matthew Paris. He remembered with absolute clarity the quality of the light, the gown his mother had worn, his cousin’s courteous gravity, in which there seemed always something sardonic, and his large hands taking the box …
Holding it carefully he went some paces forward to where the sunlight shafted through from gaps in the deck above. There was no lock but the wood had warped; he had to use some force to open the lid. Inside was a loose sheaf of papers and a stoutly bound book edged with red leather. A glance at this told him that it was a journal of some kind; the pages were covered with the angular writing he recognized as his cousin’s. The loose sheets too bore his cousin’s hand. There were words and phrases crossed out here and there. He took a sheet at random, raised it to the light and looked at the first few lines:
Thus it is that while the heart remains unharmed, life can chance to be restored to all parts, and health recovered. But if the heart be either chilled or affected with some grievous ill, it must needs be that the whole animal will suffer and fall into corruption …
Erasmus looked up towards the source of light. There was a spider’s web directly above him, the strands dusty-looking in the sunlight, the fawn-coloured host motionless in the centre. Vaguely at first, then with a sudden tightening of the throat, he remembered how his father had enjoyed singing Paris’s praises, how delighted he had been to be sending such a well-qualified surgeon with the ship. Among these accomplishments of his nephew had been the fact that he was translating a medical work from Latin, a treatise on the heart.
Erasmus could hear the voices of the men stationed on the bank. The angle of the sun had changed in this brief space of time: the light fell now directly on his face, the web was in shadow, scarcely visible. Within these rotting bowels of the ship he sensed a life that had cautiously resumed, faint scurrying sounds, minute displacements. This crumbling structure, coffin of his father’s hopes … But it was Paris who had deserted him, left him to die in ignorance. This box, which had been a parting gift, these papers, he had not forgotten them, not overlooked them: he had left them here because they belonged to a life that was over, one to which he had not intended to return; either that or he had been no longer among the living when the ship was drawn up here.
Erasmus replaced the papers, closed the lid. One or the other it must be – it was the doubt that had brought him so far. If his cousin was dead, the ledger could be closed. If he were alive he had to be found and hanged. Somewhere in this wilderness they might be still, those who had survived. The stories of the Indians came to his mind. Stories or legends, Philips had not seemed sure … They would never have stayed here among the swamps. They would have made for higher, drier ground. Unlikely they had gone so very far, hampered and burdened as they must have been, and in such difficult terrain. His mind moved among possibilities with an insistent logic. They might not have stayed together, they might have scattered, gone their different ways. But there was safety in numbers. They might have made northwards in a body for Georgia or Louisiana. But that would have meant hundreds of miles through Spanish territory, with hostile Indians all along the northern borders. Could the remnants of the crew have abandoned the negroes and escaped by sea, perhaps to Cuba or Hispaniola?
But he did not believe it. He was convinced, in a way that went beyond logic, that this ingrate jail-bird cousin of his had compounded his crimes and made his disgrace complete by siding not only with the mutinous scum of the crew but with the runaway blacks as well.
The conviction transcended his hatred for Paris. That high sense of justice that he had experienced during the voyage returned to him now. ‘It is not finished,’ he said in a low, impulsive mutter. Once more he lifted his face to the broken sunlight. ‘The debts are not paid yet. If he is alive, I will find him.’ As always, he gathered his surroundings to him, took them to witness. He promised the silence and dilapidation around him, the whole rotting hulk of the ship, that he would find his renegade cousin wherever he was skulking – find him and see him hanged.