The Quality of Mercy (14 page)

On this day he always quit the bank premises a little earlier than usual, leaving Williams, his chief clerk, in charge. Williams
had grown old in the service of the bank and knew more about its affairs than anyone. He had virtually run the bank during Kemp’s absence in Florida. Now, with this new interest in the coal industry promising to bring about further absences, perhaps prolonged, Kemp was contemplating the offer of a limited partnership in the firm, though he had said nothing of this yet to Williams.

The two chatted for some minutes while Kemp waited for his horse to be brought from the stables. As usual on this day of the week, the clerk, who knew very well the significance of Wednesdays, made polite inquiries about Sir Hugo’s state of health, speaking in tones deferentially lowered, as if his former employer’s insanity were cause for enhanced respect. And Kemp answered as he always did, briefly and rather nonchalantly, as if they were discussing the weather.

He took his accustomed route, passing south of St. Paul’s in the direction of the river. The usual array of traitors’ heads adorned the spikes above Temple Bar, and the usual enterprising characters were offering spyglasses for rent to any passersby who might be taken with a fancy for a closer look at the features of the decapitated felons. In Benton Street he passed a water cart, pulled by two hollow-ribbed horses. A ragged fellow was sprinkling water outside the shopfronts to lay the dust—the shopkeepers would generally give a halfpenny for the sweetening of their premises.

The smell of the wet dust came to him as he rode by. The water brought out a sort of impure sweetness, a compound of dust and warm cobbles and sewage, recalling to him scenes of childhood, his parents’ house in Liverpool, in Red Cross Street. On summer mornings the servants would bring out buckets from the houses to lay the dust, and it was as though the water released odors of lime flowers from the trees lining the little square and pastry smells from the houses and the muddy smell of the Mersey, not far away.

Thoughts of the Mersey brought memories of the docks to his
mind. He had sometimes gone with his father to see the unloading of the raw cotton. Smells of tar and molasses, and the smell of the slave ships waiting to be loaded with trade goods, a smell unlike any other, a dark odor of blood and excrement; the timbers were impregnated with it, no amount of scrubbing or sluicing had been able to take that smell away. It had not even been necessary to visit the dock for it, he suddenly remembered; at times it had lain over the whole town. On certain days in summer, with the breezes coming from the west, it had invaded the houses, dark, indefinite, all-pervasive, entering parlors through open windows, contending with the scents of flowers in the gardens.

It had been the reek of all captivity to him as he grew up. Neither he nor his father had ever had doubts about the legitimacy and commercial desirability of buying and selling Africans. The trade had brought an influx of capital to Liverpool and to the country as a whole, capital which had helped to fund the nation’s progress in industry and manufacturing. Nevertheless, in his present darkened and disillusioned mood, the oppression he felt at the imprisoning circumstances of his life, the sickness of heart that had accompanied his return to England, it seemed to him that this remembered odor enveloped the whole of London too.

He thought of turning down Sutcliffe Street and following the Embankment for a while. But there was too great a press of people in the vicinity of Charing Cross—more so than usual, as it seemed to him—so he took the more direct route toward the Haymarket. As he neared home, his spirits lifted. In a matter of a few hours now he would be joining Lord Spenton and his party at Vauxhall. He would have an opportunity to take a look at the man and sound him out on the possibility of an agreement between them regarding the leasing of the mines on his land. He would be going unaccompanied, which suited well with his purpose of talking privately to Spenton. But Margaret would not have gone with him even had she been alive; they had followed different courses and kept different company; for a good deal of
the time neither, if asked, would have known the whereabouts of the other.

Nevertheless, as he entered the house and felt the accustomed silence of the hall settle around him, he experienced a sort of half-resentful nostalgia. It was at this hour that he had sometimes ascended to her apartments on the first floor and taken tea with her. She had never made any special preparation for these visits of his—her preparation was all for the evening’s entertainments, in which he had no part. He would find her with her hair set in curling pins and drawn back over a little cushion on top of her head, and her face, more often than not, masked with white paste. Fritz, her poodle, and Marie, her French maid, united in hostility toward him. He had felt uncomfortable in the overheated room with its silk drapes and Italian stucco molding. Half an hour was the time allotted for these visits, and he had always been glad to leave, and always aware that she was glad to see him go. Now it was as if she had chosen to die while he was away in order to spare herself the tedium of further visits from him on his return. An illness mysterious in its causes and symptoms: increasing languidness, ravagement of the features, a drawn-out distemper or disorder of the blood. Ladies of fashion were more subject than others to this ailment, the doctors had told him. It was suspected that an excessive use of cosmetics played some part in it.

He thought of Jane Ashton’s face as she had looked on the occasion of their meeting—the only occasion so far. She had a radiance that needed no help from art. Perhaps there had been a little rouge on her cheeks. Her face had not really left him since that evening. Eyes that had not fled from his—it had been something like flight on his part that had brought him to compliment her on the gown she was wearing. The gown too had stayed in his memory, the bodice close-fitting, with a trimming of lace ruffles on the sleeves, and a lace fichu, transparent as the fashion was, allowing the beginning of the division between the breasts to be glimpsed. White silk, the petticoat … No detail could be left out, all had equal importance, all were somehow associated with
his new enterprise. He had memorized them as he might have memorized a poem, a verse of magic power. Candid, that was the word for her looks. He felt a rush of need or desire, he could not tell which, somehow made keener by the impending visit to his father-in-law, a duty always disagreeable to him. He must find a way of seeing her again, in spite of the hostile brother; he would tell her of his plans, gain her approval …

These thoughts had unsettled him. He washed his face and hands in cold water and had tea brought to him by his manservant, Hudson. Then, wearing a plain calico dressing gown over his shirt and breeches, he made his way to the top floor of the house, where Sir Hugo had his quarters. He spoke first to Sadler, the keeper, who was quiet-voiced and stout of build, qualities he needed in equal measure, as there was occasion sometimes to soothe, sometimes to restrain his charge.

“Well,” Kemp said, “how is he today?”

“Much as usual, sir. We had a bit of trouble with our soup. We have written a letter to the Lord Chancellor and another to a wigmaker in Leadenhall Street, and there is a note for Lord North, to be delivered by hand.”

Kemp looked at the sheets of paper covered in his father-in-law’s spidery handwriting. The letter to the wigmaker was an order for a silvered silk toupee with bucklers, a pigtail queue and three rolled curls, the rolls to be hollowed.

“He has a great grasp of detail, sir.” Sadler was always deeply confidential when speaking of the deranged banker. “He leaves nothing to chance.”

The note to Lord North was in the form of a petition, urging him, as a friend of the king and close in counsel to His Majesty, to do all in his power to resist the movement for abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Kemp picked out a paragraph at random:

The note would never be delivered. Sir Hugo would forget he had written it or forget when he had written it or believe it was something he still intended to write. So it was with the letter to the Lord Chancellor and that to the wigmaker. The old man spent most of the day at his writing desk and lived in the midst of a plethora of papers, which Sadler gathered from time to time and bore away.

Keeping Sadler still in attendance, Kemp went in now to see his father-in-law. “Well, sir,” he said, “and how are things with you today?”

“Ah, Erasmus, I am glad to see you.” The old man’s voice had lost nothing in clarity, nor in decisiveness and authority of tone. He never failed to recognize his son-in-law. Indeed, he recognized everybody. But his memories had lost all order and sequence, and he was often confused as to the time that things had happened—the distant past was the same to him as yesterday.

“There is something I particularly want you to do,” he said now.

“What is that, sir?”

The old man gave him a glance at once fiery and fearful under gray, disheveled eyebrows. His shirt was open at the neck to show the stringy tendons of his throat, and his scant hair stood in wisps of disarray around his head.

“We were all dressed and ready a half-hour ago, sir,” Sadler said. “But we have started a new game now, hiding things in odd
corners. Orders for wigs are issued frequent-like, but we will not on any account keep one settled on our head for more than a few minutes. As soon as your back is turned, the wig is off and stowed away somewhere.”

The old man plucked at Kemp’s sleeve, drawing him forward. “A word in private,” he said, directing a look of sharp suspicion at Sadler.

Kemp allowed himself to be led into the inner room, where Sir Hugo had his writing implements and his desk, with drawers that could be locked. It was in this sanctum that the old man spent his days, entangled in financial dealings that went back half a century.

“I am no longer sure that I can trust Sadler,” he said now. “More than once lately I have felt inclined to dismiss him.”

He went to one of the drawers in the bureau, unlocked it with a key that he took from his pocket and took out two folded sheets. “I want you to see that these are properly delivered,” he said.

Kemp opened them and read them, one after the other. The first was a bill drawn on the Bank of England to be discounted by a Manchester firm for the export of woolen goods to Lisbon in exchange for an equivalent value in gold bullion. Sir Hugo had founded the bank’s fortunes on Portuguese bullion obtained from the country’s mines in Brazil, and he had lately returned to the obstinate belief that this was still a hugely profitable trade, despite the fact that the supply of gold had dried up thirty years ago. The other paper was a promissory note addressed to the bank’s agent in Jamaica for a sum of two thousand pounds. This was one of a regular series; the old man was still purchasing negroes, or so at least he believed.

Kemp had tried and failed on various occasions to reason with his father-in-law, but he could never resist the temptation to try again. It was this obsessive buying of slaves that had led Sir Hugo into madness, and if he could be argued out of it he might be restored to sanity—or so at least his son-in-law believed. Kemp had little patience with mental disorder, regarding it in the
main as an acute form of error, something that could be mended if sufficient evidence to the contrary were advanced. The old man clung to the belief that abolition of the trade was imminent, a matter of days or weeks; he was constantly issuing instructions for the purchase of negroes, whatever their age or condition of health, convinced that when abolition passed into law he would be compensated on a per capita basis at the market price, regardless of value.

“Sir, there is no reason whatever to think that abolition will come soon, there is no sign of it, the movement has almost no following in the country. Let us consider the figures a little.” He had himself, as deriving large profits from the West India sugar trade, given considerable attention to the figures over a good many years. “The nation needs sugar, as you rightly asserted in your recent note to Lord North.”

“I wrote to his lordship, did I? I know ’twas my intention.”

“Yes, sir, you did. You do well to keep the matter present to his lordship’s mind. The consumption of sugar is deeply entrenched among the people. There would be great unrest in the land if the supply were to decline, let alone fail altogether. It is purchased in British colonies, it is brought here in British ships. So long as this holds good, there can be no falling-off or slackening, we will continue to sell negroes and buy sugar. In fact, the movement is rather the other way. Last year eighty-two slave ships sailed out of Liverpool. When I went into sugar in 1755, only twelve years ago, there were fewer than forty. In the last half-century there has been a tenfold increase in the tonnage engaged in the trade. In the last decade alone the amount returned on some thirty thousand negroes was well over a million pounds, and not much less than a million remained when the gross value of the trade goods was deducted. The average maintenance cost of the cargo during the Middle Passage amounts to only ten shillings a head, and this leaves a balance of gain on the whole equal to—”

But he saw now that the old man had grown agitated and distressed at this parade of figures, attacking as they did his
cherished plan of buying sick negroes cheaply and striving to keep them alive for the short period before abolition came. He had began plucking nervously at his clothes and hair, and after some moments he said, “I was not a member of the committee at the time, I issued no instructions to buy those pieces.”