Through the hours of darkness Paris lay on the borderlines of fever, where thought and dream and sleeping and waking are confused together. Towards morning the throbbing of his wound eased for a while and he entered a phase of clearer recollection. He was back again in the public room of Norwich Jail, with its dark, greasy walls and echoing pavement and the usual lords of the place, violent criminals all, occupying the coveted area round the fireplace. One of these he remembered in particular, and even his name, Buxton, a man convicted for robbery on the highway, on appeal for his life, a broken-toothed, staring fellow of unpredictable mood. It was Buxton, wearing a towel on his head tied up in knots in imitation of a judge’s wig, who had presided at the ‘trial’ of the young debtor. The mock-serious expression of this unbalanced ruffian was present to Paris’s mind as vividly now as if there had been no interval, as was the lost and frightened look of the young man. The two faces had remained in his memory side by side, Buxton and Deever, natural complements one to the other. Two hours in the pillory had been the sentence of this court. With his head through the legs of a chair and his hands tied up to the sides, Deever had stood stock-still in full view, head thrust forward tortoise-like below its absurd carapace, too afraid to do more than absorb his shame …
I did not intervene, Paris thought. Perhaps I lacked courage, perhaps I was afraid I might make things worse for him. It was impossible now to be sure. Memory, which still retained clearly enough the impressions of sight – Buxton with his grotesque trappings of justice, the flushed and humiliated face of the young man – did not permit any exact recollection of feeling. Certain it was that he had done nothing; the victim had been released finally on the promise of five shillings.
But what chiefly occupied him now, as the first light strained through the port of his cabin, was not his failure to protest or intervene, but his failure to learn the lesson so conveniently offered. For the men who did this cruel thing had suffered themselves in real courts and had been condemned.
I should have known it then, he thought. Nothing a man suffers will prevent him from inflicting suffering on others. Indeed, it will teach him the way … Was it always wrong then to believe that the experience of suffering would soften the heart? Those who were fond of declaring that they understood human nature would no doubt conclude so. But as the light strengthened slowly, enabling him to make out the bare furnishings of his cabin, it came to Paris that he did not want to be numbered among these knowing ones, that such understanding was worse than error, worse than hope endlessly defeated. If that is what it means to be wise, I choose folly, he told himself, and slept again and woke to daylight and a sweat of pain and the sight of Sullivan’s face above him. ‘What are you doing here, Michael?’ he said.
The beautiful, vague eyes of the fiddler sharpened with a sort of triumphant satisfaction. ‘I told him I was the one looked after you before,’ he said. ‘I went up to him an’ I introduced meself an’ enquired if he had seen anythin’ of me fiddle an’ he said he had not seen hide nor hair of it an’ he was very much afraid I would have to consent to be hanged without it. So I looked him in the eye an’ I told him hangin’ was a matter for the judge an’ if I got off I would want to know what had become of me fiddle. While he was thinkin’ over this I told him I looked after you before when you was sick an’ he damned my eyes an’ give me permission to do the same now.’
‘That was well done,’ Paris said, smiling. ‘My cousin wants me looked after so that he can the better hang me, though why he has pursued me so I cannot tell. There is not much you can do for me in any case. I applied a tourniquet as soon as I was able, to stop the bleeding, and the sergeant – who knows the business better than a number of surgeons I have met – helped me to set the leg in splints before I was carried aboard. So long as I keep still, I shall be tolerably comfortable.’
‘I thought you might like to have the comfort of washin’.’ Sullivan said. ‘I have brought a bowl of warm water. An’ I can fetch you vittles from the galley as required – he has give his permission to that.’
It was Sullivan’s standard medical procedure, which Paris remembered now from the time of his fever. ‘It is very good of you, Michael,’ he said. More in order not to disappoint than for any other reason – he felt weak and disinclined to move – he submitted to the bathing of his face and arms and chest. Sullivan was gentle and deft and kept up a stream of talk. There had been two deaths among the people of the settlement in addition to those of Billy and Kireku. Cavana had been fatally wounded when he tried to break out with Danka and Tiamoko on the other side of the compound; Neema, seeing him fall, had lost her head and rushed out after the men and been killed before she had gone a dozen steps. Her baby, which they had named only the night before, was being suckled by Sallian. Nadri had succeeded in reaching the trees but he had been tracked down and taken by the Creeks.
‘And Tabakali?’
‘She is there with the rest of them,’ Sullivan said. ‘Kenka is with her, an’ the other two children. They are all together on deck under guard of the sojers. The crew people are kept separate.’
‘Yes,’ Paris said, ‘we have a separate future now. They cannot sell us, you see, so they will try to hang us as the next best thing.’
‘Koudi is there, among the others,’ Sullivan said. ‘She looked at me kindly while I was playin’. I should have gone to her straight, but I did not. We are not allowed near them now. After we get to St Augustine I’ll never see her again in this life.’ He paused a moment and his face brightened a little. ‘Mebbe I will, after all,’ he said. ‘I have had a good omen.’
‘What was that?’
‘There is a bit of a story to it. When I was first brought aboard the Liverpool Merchant in company with poor Billy, God rest his soul, I was wearin’ a fine coat with brass buttons down the front. Now this coat was took from me without so much as a by-your-leave, along with ivery stitch I had on, an’ I was given slop clothes from the ship’s store. That was bad enough for a start, but the worst of it was, they niver give me back the buttons. Thim buttons was niver mentioned again. Now you know the world, Matthew, like meself, an’ so you will know there is always somethin’ that will rouse a man, howsoever patient an’ long-sufferin’ that man may be.’
Thus appealed to, Paris nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘sooner or later there will always be something that we cannot overlook or pretend indifference to, something that sticks in the throat.’
‘You have hit me meanin’ exactly. Thim buttons stuck in me throat more than anythin’ else I can call to mind. They were worth money, but it was more than that – a man has his self-respect to think of. I always suspected Haines of stealin’ them an’ I got proof of it one day when we were ashore cuttin’ stakes. I offered to fight Haines for them, but Wilson took the quarrel on himself an’ so me chance was lost.’
Sullivan paused in his task of drying Paris’s shoulders and neck, and gave a smile of considerable sweetness. ‘He would have beat me anyway,’ he said. ‘The long an’ short of it is that I niver got me buttons back. Then Haines was killed an’ as time went by they went out of me mind. Then yesterday, as they were drivin’ us through the bush to where the boats were waitin’, I tripped over me own feet an’ fell down the side of a stream, nearly in the water. There I was, lyin’ on me face in the mud with all the wind gone out of me sails and the corporal cursin’ at me from the bank. An’ it was then I seen it, not six inches from me eyes. It was crusted over with clay, but I knew it.’
He bent down quickly and fumbled a moment at the string of his moccasin. When he straightened up his face wore its usual serious, slightly melancholy expression. On his right palm, held out to view, a smooth round metal button the size of a shilling gleamed yellow in the flat, shadowless light of the cabin. ‘I give it a bit of a polishin’,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t understand how it had come about at first, not for the life of me, then I bethought meself – that must have been the very spot where Haines met his end at the hands of the Indians. It must have dropped from him somehow an’ the Blessed Virgin tripped up me feet at the very place.’
He was still standing there, with the miraculous find shining softly on his palm, when they heard sounds beyond the door. Sullivan brought his hands quickly to his sides. A moment later the door opened and Erasmus stepped over the threshold. ‘You can suspend your ministrations for a while,’ he said curtly to Sullivan. ‘I want a few words with Mr Paris.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Sullivan, however, did not leave quite at once, but turned first to Paris and said, ‘Will there be anythin’ more I can do for you?’
‘No, thank you, nothing.’
‘In that case,’ Sullivan said, ‘I’ll take meself off.’
Erasmus watched him leave. ‘There is a brazen fellow,’ he said. ‘He had the impudence to ask me the whereabouts of his fiddle. That is a gallows-bird, if ever I saw one.’
‘If you think that, you cannot ever have seen one.’ Paris was propped up in his bunk now and able to get a steady view of his cousin’s face, which was white and strained-looking. ‘To what do I owe this visit?’ he asked. ‘I must tell you, cousin, it is not welcome to me.’
‘I do not care if it is welcome or not,’ Erasmus said. ‘You have forfeited your rights in such matters.’ On this, however, he paused. He was conscious his cousin’s question was one that could not be answered altogether frankly. After dismissing Barton in the early hours of the morning he had slept deeply – his first good sleep for days. But he had woken once again to desolation. There are forms of triumph or fulfilment, and these not always virtuous, that require no witness, they are sufficient in themselves and can be enjoyed in the quietness of the soul; but the sense of being an instrument of justice was not, it seemed, of this order, not for Erasmus at least; he had felt the need to see it registered on a human face, and there was only one that would do: in all the world there was only Paris that could make the triumph of justice real to him. ‘I have been learning something of this settlement of yours,’ he said at last. ‘I am told that it was founded on the best philosophical principles.’
Paris saw the mockery of this move the tense lines of his cousin’s mouth and realized that Erasmus had come to bait him. Despite his weakness and the pain of his leg, the old combative urge rose in him, the refusal of intellect – or pride – to allow another to interpret the world for him, least of all a man who held him captive. ‘It sounds as if your informant was Barton,’ he said. ‘He is not much acquainted with principles of any kind.’
‘No, but it is rich, don’t you think so,’ Erasmus said, ‘considering that your little colony took its rise from murder and theft?’ He had wished to maintain a tone of levity, but with Paris’s first words a rigidness had settled over his features and his lips tightened as he spoke.
‘Murder and theft?’ Paris looked at his cousin with something like wonder. ‘You have just stolen these people from their homes and murdered three of them in the course of it. Their blood is on your head, no matter who fired the shots. Two of them had nothing whatever to do with Thurso’s death – in fact they were some of the stolen goods that you came all this way to recover.’
The folly of this took some of the tension from Erasmus’s face. ‘Your stay in this wilderness has unsettled your brain,’ he said. ‘You must be mad to make such comparisons. Thurso was set in authority over you. He was engaged in a lawful trade. These people are fugitives on the one hand and chattels on the other. I have proceeded at every step with total legality. I have a warrant from the Governor of Florida.’
‘Useful thing, a warrant. Murder and theft change their names if you have one. I suppose the Governor himself was armed with one when he took Florida for the Crown?’
‘That is a treasonable speech,’ Erasmus said. ‘I have noted it.’
‘I can only be hanged once,’ Paris said. ‘I do not think we will get far along these lines, Erasmus. But I assure you I had no principles worthy the name. It was Delblanc who was our theorist.’ His head felt heavy and there was a pain gathering behind his eyes. What had Delblanc believed? It was an effort now to think about it. Men are moral beings in their untrammelled nature. If constraint and coercion can once be removed they will be happy and if they are happy they will also be good …
‘I did not really share these views,’ he said, under the momentary impression that he had explained to Erasmus what they were. ‘But I knew people are held together by having the sense of a common destiny. And of course I had certain hopes.’
‘What hopes were those?’ The tone was sneering, yet there was an ardour in the question that Erasmus could not conceal. He had been outraged by his cousin’s manner. Flushed out from his bolt-hole, wounded and helpless, with his crimes brought home to him, Paris showed no trace of contrition; he spoke as if engaged in some vague and desultory debate. It was monstrous. And yet Erasmus was held, and in some way fascinated, by what the other was saying; he was conscious of effort, of needing continually to make a wider embrace of hatred and contempt to encompass these movements of his cousin’s mind, to let nothing escape.
And Paris too felt driven, perhaps to disarm or somehow outflank this enmity which he felt as a pressure almost physical and which he could not altogether understand. ‘I knew we had done them harm beyond reckoning,’ he said. ‘It was impossible to pretend otherwise. It was impossible not to see that we had taken everything from them and only for the sake of profit – that sacred hunger, as Delblanc once called it, which justifies everything, sanctifies all purposes. You see, I began my career as ship’s surgeon in ignorance and carelessness. Because my life was in ruins I thought it was unimportant what I did, what I assisted in – I thought it could only degrade myself. This was an offence to reason as well as feeling. We have a duty to be vigilant …’
He fell silent again. The burden of explanation seemed too heavy. Had it not been for pain of body and weariness of spirit he might have seen that it was useless in any case. He had sufficient store of irony and under other circumstances might have realized that he was not the ideal man to offer illumination of any kind. His genius was for error. He had blundered once through confusion between obstinate pride and the disinterested promulgation of truth; and then again – though perhaps it was not much different – through the illusion that his own despair was of cosmic import. Throughout the days of the settlement he had mistaken his desire to make amends for a belief in the capacities of the human spirit. And now, ragged and feverish captive, he was blundering again, prating of wisdom and virtue to a man determined to believe him wicked, a man to whom virtue meant well-cut clothes, a proud bearing, money in the bank.
What, more than anything, he seemed to Erasmus – who had no resources of irony whatever – was an object lesson in how not to conduct one’s life. It was only by a persistent operation of the will that Erasmus could maintain belief in his cousin as a scapegoat worthy enough. He glanced at Paris now, saw the deathly pallor below the tan, the small beads of perspiration that had appeared on the brow. How could a vessel so sickly bear so much blame? There was a terrible discrepancy here and Erasmus flinched from it as from a mortal threat.
‘It is a lesson strangely hard to learn,’ he heard Paris say in low tones.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said coldly. ‘What lesson? A man with anything about him knows what he wants and tries to get it.’ This was so obvious that it made him impatient. ‘That is the way the world goes forward,’ he said, ‘whether in your settlement back there or my larger one on the banks of the Thames. Nothing would ever get done otherwise.’
‘Well, that might not be such a bad thing,’ Paris said, rather faintly.
‘You have not yet told me of your precious hopes.’
In spite of the weariness that was gaining on him now, Paris heard the malice in this question, and something more, something strangely like appeal. His cousin was desperate for him to admit failure, disappointment, defeated hope. ‘You want to take everything from me,’ he said. ‘I cannot understand why you hate me so. Why should I explain further to you, who only want to hear a bad report? I owe you nothing. If I wronged anyone, it is your father. He showed me kindness and might think I have made a poor return. I hope I may be allowed to speak to him and given some chance to explain.’
He had closed his eyes on these last words. He heard a single harsh note of laughter and opened them again to see something wild and disbelieving on his cousin’s face. He saw Erasmus raise a hand briefly to his brow. ‘What is the matter?’ he said.
‘You do not know it,’ Erasmus said. ‘How could you? I had forgot …’
With this, it came from him in a stream there was no stopping, his father’s death – and he did not conceal the nature of this now from Paris – the ruin it had brought, the loss of his bride, all the years of paying back the debts. That these years had brought him also wealth and power he did not mention. The fact was evident enough in any case; and he could think only of his wrongs, only of his cousin’s monstrous guilt. And because of this all caution departed him, all the lessons he had learned in a hard school: that you must keep your object firmly in mind and rigorously exclude all that might be prejudicial to it, that you must always hold something back, keep something in reserve, because that is the way to retain control. All this, in the treacherous fluency that swept him, was forgotten. He found himself talking to this hated cousin, whom he had pursued and crippled and intended more firmly than ever to see hanged, as he could have talked to no one else, with a fervent intimacy that in some part of his mind astonished him still as he spoke, with revelations of feeling long buried within him, the deceit of his father’s silence and its wounding lack of trust, the bitterness of his mother’s superior wit in their dealings with the doctor, old Wolpert’s patronizing treatment of him and Sarah’s inability to see the true meaning of his renunciation. ‘She accused me of wanting to add her to my store of possessions,’ he said. He had never forgotten the words. ‘I was forced to go into sugar when I wanted to build canals. I married against my inclination for the sake of the alliance …’ Sarah was long since married, he knew it from his Liverpool acquaintance; she had married a local squire and there were children now.
All this he sought to lay at his cousin’s door. But to Paris, listening with face averted, it seemed that Erasmus was not accusing, but confessing: he was begging to be released. ‘Nothing that becomes of me can mend these things,’ he said. ‘You will still be where you were.’ He saw that Erasmus had drawn himself up into a position of rigid attention in the course of speaking, as if braced for some ordeal. The pathos of his cousin’s singleness of vision came to him, the terrible emptiness of conquest. ‘Can you not see that?’ he said gently.
Erasmus heard the change of tone, detected amidst the lines of weariness and pain on his cousin’s face traces of an insolent compassion. All his life he had hated to see knowledge of him on any face. After a moment more he turned and walked out of the cabin. Outside the door, at the foot of the ladder, he stood for a short while as if uncertain of his direction. Tears had risen to his eyes, a rare thing with him. Of all the injuries that Paris had done him it seemed to him for a moment that this kindness of tone was the worst.