Privileged by his wound, Paris was conveyed as directly as possible to the shore and rowed out to the ship in the late afternoon. Before midnight both troops and captives had been embarked and the ship set a course northward for St Augustine.
It was Erasmus’s hope that he might avoid the delays of a long sea journey home to England, and the risk of his cousin cheating justice even now by some obscure and private death, by having the people of the crew tried and condemned either at St Augustine by Campbell or, if the latter felt this exceeded his competence, by the Governor of South Carolina, where the negroes were to be taken and sold. To this end it was important that at least one of the wrong-doers should be persuaded to inform upon his comrades in exchange for a pardon. Erasmus felt that he knew human nature passably well and did not anticipate any problem here. It would come better from a common seaman, one who had taken an active part; an officer of the ship might be able to claim that he had acted under duress. However, Barton had already proved willing to cooperate and Erasmus decided to interview him first so as to establish the facts.
The intention once formed, he could not wait for the morning. He had slept little for two nights now and the emotions of that day had exhausted him but he could not rest. The ship was barely under way when he had Barton shaken awake where he lay on the open deck and brought below.
There was rum and salt beef and ship’s biscuit laid out on the table. Also, close to Erasmus’s right hand, a loaded pistol. A soldier with bayonet fixed stood outside the door. Barton sat opposite at the table and a candle-lamp lay between them. The former mate wore nothing but a round cap made of rope yarn, the tattered remains of a red silk scarf and a pair of deerskin drawers, and he shivered like a dog in the warmer air of the cabin. Erasmus poured him a glass of rum and he swallowed half of it, hissing on an indrawn breath as the warmth spread through him. He took off his cap and laid it on the table beside him. His lank, gingerish hair fell forward round his face.
‘I know who you are,’ Erasmus said. ‘You were mate on my father’s ship. You have already answered to your name today and so it would serve no purpose to deny it now. I intend to ask you some questions. If you know what is good for you, you will answer me frankly and fully.’
Barton raised his head to drink again, draining his glass. The sharp edge of his Adam’s apple pricked like a thorn against the loose skin of his throat.
‘If you are honest with me now,’ Erasmus said, ‘I will speak on your behalf when the time comes.’
Whatever calculations Barton engaged in were of short duration. ‘I knowed this would happen sooner or later,’ he said. ‘I am a child o’ misfortun’ an’ no mistake. A man o’ sorrows, I am, and on noddin’ terms with grief. That is in the good book, sir. I was brought up for better things than what you see now. I can read an’ write, if you will believe me, my sainted mother taught me at her knee, but misfortun’ has been my lot in this life.’
‘You will deepen your acquaintance with grief very considerably, my friend,’ Erasmus said, ‘if you thus persist in going round and round about things. What befell the ship?’
‘What befell her?’ Barton eyed the rum. Cornered as he was, his sense of theatre did not desert him. And he was not altogether destitute, he now perceived: he possessed knowledge the other needed – how strong the need could be seen from the quality of attention he was receiving, the starkness of interest on the handsome face opposite him. ‘There is a story in that,’ he said, reaching to take some of the meat.
But he had paused too long. Erasmus struck the table with a blow that made the glasses rattle. ‘God damn your eyes,’ he said, ‘you impudent rogue, you, stop your cursed play-acting or I will shoot you where you sit.’
‘She didn’t go down,’ Barton said in sudden haste. ‘She never went down, sir. We was blown off our course by a storm that comes in them parts in late summer, what they call hurricanoes, sir, but we never sank. That was a stout ship, she was a gallant ship in every line of her, I was proud to sail on her.’
‘I will crop your ears yet,’ Erasmus said between his teeth. ‘What the devil do I care for your pride? Tell me what happened.’
‘By that time there wasn’t enough healthy men aboard to man her an’ we was in fear the blacks would rise on us. We was blown westward here, on to the coast of south Florida. The captain was dead by then … We was unlucky from the start. The trades fell short of us more than usual for the time o’ year an’ we had the bloody flux among the negroes before we cleared the Gulf o’ Guinea. ’Tis a sea o’ thunder there, sir, an’ a breeding ground o’ plague, with rain an’ fire comin’ down by turns. Six weeks an’ we was still south-west o’ the Cape Verde Islands and they was dyin’ on us every day. ’Tis a terrible trade, them not in it will never know the hardships, to see your profits dribblin’ into the sea an’ nothin’ you can do. I felt for your father an’ you, sir, my heart bled, Barton has always been faithful to his owners.’
Erasmus poured out more rum. In these close quarters he could smell the sharp reek of sweat, mingled with some fishy odour, that came from the other’s body, and he tensed his nostrils against it with involuntary repugnance. There was a glaze of the gutter about Barton that no outdoor living had been able to affect; it was there in the abjectness of the manner, which had something insolent in it too, and in the ragged, jaunty finery of the silk scarf. The voice was husky and dry, for all the rum, making its claims of constancy and fidelity, seeking to find the right note, enlist favour, strike a course that would bring him in safe from wind and wave. Erasmus set no store by the protestations, but he did not interrupt. Barton appeared to be in the grip of his own story now, staring and eager with it.
‘We had to keep ’em under hatches a lot o’ the time, increasing the mortality considerable. I tell you, it would have broke your heart to see it. The doctor worked like a slave himself to keep the beggars in the world …’
Erasmus looked up sharply at this and found the mate’s eyes fixed on him in a sort of stealthy appraisal, disturbing in one whom he had thought so lost in his narrative. ‘What are you looking at?’ he said. ‘Do you mean Paris?’
‘Aye, him. Feed ’em with his own hand, he would. That would be your cousin, I believe, sir, on the materlineal side?’
‘What is that to you?’ Erasmus said violently. He was silent for some moments. Then, more calmly, he said, ‘He did no more than his duty, I suppose.’
‘No, sir. Well, on the materlineal side, so they say, it is not so strong.’ No change had occurred in the mate’s voice but there was a certain cautious relaxation in the peering expression of his face and the spread of his elbows on the table. He had found a direction. ‘He only done what he was paid to do,’ he said after a moment. ‘We all done that, every man of us. This is a excellent quality o’ rum, sir.’
‘I don’t want to know your opinion of the rum. Here, damn you, have some more. How did Thurso die?’
‘There was various wounds, but the cause o’ death was stabbin’.’
‘Who struck the blow?’
Barton narrowed his eyes as if in a sustained effort of memory. ‘Things was confused,’ he said. ‘It is long years ago now, sir, an’ my remembrance is not clear.’
‘You had better endeavour to clear it,’ Erasmus said. ‘I shall want to know these things from you.’
‘I dare say it will all come floodin’ back to me in the course o’ time. Anyhow, it was the ship’s people that killed Thurso. They rose on him. I spoke out agin it. With Barton, duty always comes first. They would have killed me but they was stopped from it by Mr Delblanc, he was a passenger aboard, an’ by the doctor.’
‘What part did he play? Mr Paris, I mean. He was the leader, then? He led the others into this mutiny?’
Barton paused. There was no doubt expressed on his face, only a kind of intensified alertness. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, ‘he was the leader, without the shadder of a doubt.’
‘Was he the first to raise his hand against the captain?’
‘In a manner o’ speakin’, he was. You see, sir, we had decided to jettison a good part o’ the cargo. That is, the captain had decided it an’ he put it to me an’ Haines an’ the carpenter, Barber, the night before. Haines was the bos’n. The second mate was dead by then of a putrid fever and so we was the only officers left, if you don’t count the –’
‘Jettison them? You mean throw them overboard?’ Erasmus passed a hand over his brow. ‘What, alive as they stood, and fettered?’
‘Only them that was sickly, sir. We knowed we could never make Kingston market with ’em. An’ if we did, we could not have sold ’em, they was too far gone. The worst o’ the weather was over but we was blown far westward, Jamaica was a good ten days off by the captain’s reck’nin’, even in fair conditions. The water was givin’ out, we was already on half a pint a day. We was wastin’ water on the negroes, d’you see, sir, because they was dyin’ anyway. That is not a efficient use o’ resources. Not only that, but a negro dyin’ o’ nat’ral causes was a total loss to the owners, that is to your father, sir, beggin’ your pardon, an’ to you as his son an’ hair. If they was jetsoned we could claim the insurance, an’ that stood at thirty per cent o’ the value in them days. But you had to show good an’ sufficient cause.’
Erasmus was silent for some considerable time, holding a hand over his eyes as if to shield them from the light. ‘Shortage of water would constitute sufficient cause,’ he said at last. ‘It could be seen as a question of survival. But wait, did you not say that there had been storms of rain? The casks should have been full.’
‘My,’ Barton exclaimed admiringly, ‘you have got a head on your shoulders, sir, an’ no mistake. The main cask was holed, the water leaked away unbeknown to us.’
‘Yes, I see,’ Erasmus said slowly. ‘The cask had suffered damage in the rough weather.’ A court was likely enough to accept that, he thought, with Barton spruced up to say so and one more to support him. ‘I find that Captain Thurso acted lawfully and within his rights,’ he said.
‘That is how we seen the matter when the captain explained things to us. Haines would tell you the same, but unfortunately he has passed over, he was murdered by savvidges.’
‘And my cousin intervened, you say? He set himself up against the lawful authority of the captain?’
‘Yes, sir. It was early mornin’ an’ Mr Paris was below with a fever. He must have heard some commotion – we had already sent some o’ them over the side. He come up an’ seen what was happenin’ an’ he shouted an’ raised his hand agin it. The captain drew a pistol on him an’ that was what started things off.’
‘Thurso went armed then?’
‘He had taken to it, sir. The men was mutterin’ agin him.’
‘As pretty a piece of arrogant meddling as ever I heard of,’ Erasmus said, as if to himself. ‘The more I think about the business,’ he said more loudly, ‘the more it seems to me that the captain’s decision was a sound one, not only in practical terms, but also more humane, as shortening the sufferings of these wretches.’
‘Them is the sentiments I remember experiencin’ at the time.’ Barton raised his thin face as if sniffing at the air, and for the merest glimmer of a second lamplight was confused with sunlight in Erasmus’s mind and he remembered again the day of the accident at the dockside, Thurso and the mate emerging side by side from the shadow of the ship’s hull. Barton had spoken to him about the building of the hull, he recollected. He wore the same relishing look now and Erasmus had the same sense that the mate was trying to form some alliance, some intimacy of understanding, between them. ‘I am not interested in your sentiments,’ he said. ‘Keep them to yourself. Thurso could hardly have done more for those negroes, short of killing them out of hand.’
‘He couldn’t do that, sir.’ Barton spoke softly, seeming in no way put out by the snub. ‘That would be unlawful. The underwriters would never have consented to pay money on negroes killed aboard ship, not unless it was in the course of a uprisin’, an’ these was in no case to rise on us.’
Erasmus nodded. ‘As I understand it, the mutineers, led by Mr Paris, later appropriated what remained of the negroes and carried them ashore. That is correct, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘First mutiny, then murder, then piracy,’ Erasmus said. ‘Any one of them a capital offence.’ As he spoke the ship’s bell sounded on the deck above them – it was two o’clock in the morning. The night was calm and the vessel sat evenly upon the water with no sound but the slow, irregular creaking of her timbers.
‘They needed the negroes,’ Barton said. ‘They couldn’t have got the ship in behind the shore without the blacks to help with the towin’. She had to be towed from the banks, sir. Every man, woman and child that could stand on their feet had to bear a hand with the ropes.’
‘Yes, yes, I know that part of it. In your opinion, was there any intention to return?’
‘The vessel was grounded, sir. They hacked through her masts.’
‘Did they declare they would not return? Did you hear Mr Paris say that?’
‘Yes, sir, I did. Him an’ Mr Delblanc. They talked about settin’ up a kind o’ colony in the wilderness, where men could live in a state o’ nature.’
‘In a state of nature? What the plague does that mean?’
‘Curse me if I know.’ With instant responsiveness Barton’s tone had changed to match the amused contempt he saw come to Erasmus’s face. ‘They talked a lot about freedom an’ justidge,’ he said. ‘They was goin’ to found a colony where everybody would be equal an’ have no use for money.’
‘That den of thieves.’ Erasmus, suddenly, was smiling. There is a broad division between those who laugh at the perception of incongruities in the world and within themselves, and those in whom laughter is released as a celebration of their own successes, a perception, not of incongruity but of total, triumphant correspondence. Erasmus was of this latter sort. Everything had fallen into his hands. He had Paris alive; the guilt was confirmed, the evidence overwhelming; in Barton he had found an instrument of justice infinitely pliable. And now to hear of these ridiculous aspirations … It was like crystal sugar on the cake. ‘By God, that’s rich,’ he said.
And Barton, seeing his new protector’s smile deepen, felt something of the delight of one who has found the key to a puzzle he had feared might be too intricate. ‘They thought they could start afresh,’ he said, with contemptuous indulgence.