Free Sacred Hunger by Barry Unsworth Page B

high up in the smoky brightness, difficult to see. He watched the plank hauled to the level of the platform, saw it manhandled into position against the batten markers, saw it driven into place with heavy mallets, the blows sounding in ragged unison as the men forced the heavy timber to bend in obedience to the curving shape of the hull. Once in place it was held there against the strain of its cooling fibres with thick wooden billets that fitted flush against the plank and were bolted through and locked on the inside of the vessel.
    “By God, those two fellows are putting their backs into it,” Kemp said in tones of approval.
    It was not quite flush, Erasmus noticed: the billets amidships, where the convex curve was greatest, did not seem long enough, and had to be lashed to the bolt-heads; the two men his father had referred to were hauling at the short ropes, leaning back on their narrow platform to get a better purchase.
    Kemp took out his watch and consulted it.
    “Less than fifteen minutes to get that timber in place.”
    Thurso was beginning, in his laborious, impeded way, to say something in reply, when there was a wrenching sound from the ship’s side, followed at once by a strangely tuneful twanging note, like a single vibrant beat of pinions. Erasmus glimpsed a flying shape of white caught in the sun like a flash of wings, saw the gap where the timber had sprung free, sweeping the two men working there off the platform, one to slide down between hull and slipway and lie groaning out of sight, the other, whose fall his eye had caught, flung clear on to the wharfside, where he lay broken and still.
    The pause of shock, before the men’s mates moved towards them, was of the briefest; but to Erasmus, when he thought later about it, it had no limits, extending without dimension of time into the blank afternoon, the hazy light, that twanging note of death. He was young enough still to glance at the others’ faces for guidance in composing his own; and what he saw there had no end or beginning either. The only face on which he could detect any expression at all was Thurso’s, whose small eyes contained a look of satisfaction, as at some promise fulfilled.

9.
    From a man maimed and a man dead and a look in another man’s eyes, his memories of the ship took a sweep over a void and only found lodgement again in the week before she was launched. There were difficulties with the figurehead, which continued almost up to the last minute, due to his father’s wish for changes and his consequent altercations with the carver, Samuel Oates.
    Oates was a notable craftsman, famed for his execution of figureheads, quarter figures and all kinds of ornamental scrollwork for the timber heads. He had been a shipwright till a fall from scaffolding had lamed him and sent him back to his boyhood passion for carving wood. With the expansion in shipbuilding he had prospered greatly and now employed two journeymen and several apprentices.
    These days he did not take kindly to customers who pestered him over details.
    Kemp, however, was adamant. He knew the importance of emblems; and he knew what he wanted. For the rudder he wanted the bust of a man in a plumed hat and full wig, to epitomize the newly formed Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, of which he had become a member. For his figurehead he wanted the Duchess of Devonshire as the Spirit of Commerce, flanked by two small lions. He had seen the duchess once and thought her splendid. It was she now who was causing the difficulty. Either Oates had misunderstood his instructions or comz Erasmus suspected—his father had changed opinion, which he more frequently did these days. In any event the carver had fashioned her bareheaded, whereas Kemp had decided that he wanted some regal adornment, something like a diadem or coronet. “Not a crown,” he said. “It would not be seemly for her to wear a crown. But if she is to represent the enterprise that creates the nation’s wealth,