The Quality of Mercy (22 page)

The crowd grew a little. He heard a coin strike against those of his own he had previously laid there to serve as good example. He repeated the air on his fiddle, then chose another song, a melody slower and more lingering, requiring a raised head and a look of yearning:

He continued until nightfall. When he counted the takings, he found they came to fivepence halfpenny in coins of small denomination, a reward he considered reasonable. As he was leaving he noticed a beer tent crowded with people, open at the sides and roofed over with canvas, brightly lit now that darkness had come. He felt dry after his singing; the thought of an energizing draft was suddenly tempting and after some moments more became irresistibly so.

He entered, fiddle and bow slung over his shoulder, made his way to the long counter where several people were serving from the barrels and asked for a pint of ale, which cost one penny. He was tired, he did not feel sociable, he would have preferred to drink outside in the open, away from the crowd. But he could not leave the tent without returning his mug: there would be men
posted to watch out for any move of that kind, the mug being worth more than the ale contained in it. So he made his way to a far corner of the tent, where the lamps did not reach with full strength and there was a twilight zone.

However, he was no more than halfway through his drink when a woman came up close to him, bade him good evening and, finding he did not draw away, rubbed the front of her thigh against him. “You could give us a swaller o’ that, you could, mister fiddler,” she said.

This rubbing, and the thinness of the material of the woman’s skirt, worked an immediate effect on Sullivan. He had not been with a woman for a long time now, not since the days of the Florida settlement. There had been the long return to England, during which he had been kept in irons; there had been the weeks he had spent, still fettered, in prison; there had been the miracle of his escape, the sacredness of his vow, the urgent need to get away from London and escape pursuit …

“Here,” he said, handing her the mug. “I am not the man to deny a sup of ale to a lady.”

He watched her drink, saw the movement of her throat.

“I knowed you was a gen’leman soon as I set eyes on you,” she said, and paused, and drank again.

“I will go and get you a pint for yourself,” Sullivan said, but she laid a hand on his arm. “No,” she said, “don’t go away, you might forget me.”

She was not very pretty and not very young, but she had bold eyes and a painted mouth, and when her hand slipped from his arm and came gently to rest on his abdomen, he felt very constricted in his trousers, and began to lose all thought of consequences.

“S’ppose you an’ me was to go for a stroll outside,” she said. “It’s a nice night, ain’t it?” She handed him back the mug. “You better finish this.”

A final, feeble impulse of caution came to Sullivan. “How much?” he said.

“I asks two shillin’ in the usual way of things.”

“I have not got two shillin’.”

“How much have you got?”

“One shillin’ an’ eightpence halfpenny.”

“Well, I have took a fancy to you. That was a lovely song you sang, that one about Eileen. I will take a bit less this time.”

Sullivan, too much in haste to return the mug to the counter, let it fall, empty now, into the dark grass at his feet. The sense that he was getting a special price destroyed the last of his reserve, and they stepped out of the tent together.

They walked away from the lights, went through a gate into the next field, found a place near the hedge. “First we pays, then we has our fun,” the woman said, and Sullivan handed over the money. “I would spread me coat for you, if I had one,” he said. “I had a fine coat once.” The echo of an old obsession came to him, even in this moment of high excitement. “I had a fine coat once, but it was took off me back, twice I have had me buttons stole—”

“Well, I ain’t goin’ to steal ’em now,” she said. “You better unbutton them what you have got left.”

No time was wasted on further speech. The woman went down on her back, lifted up her skirt and spread her legs. There was no impediment of undergarments. Sullivan found his way and was very soon in the throes of delight. But these had barely subsided when his peace was disturbed by a light on his face, and he saw two men standing above him, both armed with heavy sticks.

“Aye, aye,” one of the men said. “What ’ave we got ’ere? A pair o’ nightbirds, ain’t we?”

Sullivan scrambled to his feet and with a gallantry he felt to be commendable at such a time held out his hand to help the woman up. “Who might you be?” he said.

“It is the constables,” the woman said.

“That is right, my pretty. You’ve ’ad to do with us before, ain’t you?”

“Don’t know you from Adam, I don’t.”

“She don’t look at the faces,” the other man said.

“I have seen somethin’ of the world an’ you do not have the look of constables to me,” Sullivan said. “You must have watched us and follered after.”

“No need for talkin’. All you needs to do is show us you have got money enough about you for a night’s lodgin’, an’ we will let you alone.”

Sullivan said nothing to this for some moments, hoping that the woman would come to his aid and say they were together and had money in common. But she remained silent.

“I have no money,” he said at last. “Owin’ to a combination of circumstances which I have not the leisure to go into at the present moment.”

“Sleepin’ in the open, no abode an’ no money. You are a vagrant, an’ you will ’ave to come along with us to the parish workhouse.”

“Show me your badge of office,” Sullivan said, and received a violent push in the chest that sent him back several steps.

“Any more o’ that an’ you will get a batterin’. An’ don’t try makin’ a run for it, you will not get far.” He turned to the woman, shining the lamp in her face. “ ’Ow about you?” he said. “Betsy, ain’t it? ’Ow much did he give you?”

“He give me a shillin’.”

“Ho, yes. Very likely. Well, you gives us the shillin’ an’ you keeps the rest, an’ everythin’ is fair an’ aboveboard.”

With the sad, belated wisdom that follows upon passion spent, Sullivan saw his bread and cheese and his bed for the night transferred to the pocket of one of the men. Betsy left the scene at a good speed and without a backward glance, and he was taken by the arms and led away.

As the time approached for the handball match with the neighboring colliery village of Northfield, Michael Bordon spent his Sunday mornings and evenings practicing, alone or with anyone who cared to play, at the handball court, which lay alongside the alehouse. He was now, by the consent of a large majority, Thorpe’s appointed champion, and he took the responsibility very seriously. Sunday afternoons he spent walking out with Elsie Foster. They had now reached the stage of walking hand in hand.

His mother had been the first to notice the change in him. He would previously, after the practice session, put on his pit clothes and go to play chuck farthing or sit in talk with the other men. Now he would spend a long time over combing his hair, and ask her more often to trim it for him. He would get out his best suit, the breeches with embroidered kneebands, the coat close-fitting, cut in at the waist.

Nan was carried back to the days of her courtship. She had been lucky in Bordon, she knew that; he was sometimes violent with others but never other than gentle with her. There was something unfulfilled in him, something rebellious and unresigned, that made him often somber, and this was more evident now that he grew older. He knew that Michael was walking out with Elsie Foster and that the family would lose income when the boy
married; this would not be yet, but probably as soon as Michael went from putter to hewer. Bordon had married then himself.

Both of them approved of the girl and the family. Elsie worked on the tips, just as Nan had done. Bordon had taken her from that work, as it was likely Michael would do with Elsie.

Her husband’s best clothes were still there, in the trunk, though it was seldom that he wore them now. She went and got out the cravat, remembering how smart he had looked when he first came calling, so tall and straight, turning his cap in his hands. Her brother Billy had run off to sea before that …

She decided to give the cravat to Michael as a special thing to wear for this first walking-out. It was very fine, muslin edged with lace. He was dismayed by it. Fancy cravats of this kind were no longer worn by anyone he knew. But he said nothing. He looked at his mother’s face, which was lit up, the lines of work and weariness all smoothed away by the memories this totally unwearable cravat had brought her. He put on the cravat, tied it properly in a bow and set forth. When he was out of the sight of the house he took it off and put it in his pocket.

Elsie too wore her best clothes for these outings; they were always much the same, but he was always smitten anew by the look of her, the white hose and short dimity petticoats, the printed cotton gown, the stomacher with its bunches of variously colored ribbons, the straw hat tied under the chin—it was what the other girls wore for Sunday best, but on her it seemed uniquely fetching.

They took the path that led across the big field, where Michael had fought with Walker. It was a fine afternoon; others were walking there, they exchanged greetings as they passed. Ahead of them, to the north, the sky was divided by a broad, straight-edged band of cloud that seemed precisely ruled across from verge to verge. Above this band there was still the blue of day, deep and luminous; below it the delicate and reticent shades of evening were gathering, bronze, silver, slate gray, palest apricot.

Michael slowed his step. “Shall we gan through the Dene?” he said.

There was a pause before the reply came, but it was of the briefest. “If tha likes.”

She would have thought it improper in Michael to suggest this at any earlier stage. Like holding hands, it was a necessary and time-honored step in the progress of courtship, the first experience of enclosure, of being screened off and out of view. Generations of couples had traversed these paths above the beck; many were the children that had been conceived here.

Talk was more personal and intimate with them now, and as they crossed the pasture fields and began to descend toward the deep cut which marked the beginning of the Dene, Michael told her of the attempts he had made to get the overman to shift David from being Walker’s marrow to being his. “Walker an’ me are both puttin’ the coal, just the same,” he said. “Why not keep it in the family? Walker can find someone else—he can have the lad that works with me, if he wants.”

“Well, but,” she said, “tha wouldna be doin’ him nay favor. Walker would just start knockin’ him about. What a mean, he’ll keep his hands off yor David, now that tha’s had it out with him.”

“Well, that’s one way of lookin’ at it,” Michael said. It was an aspect that had not occurred to him, or to his father either.

Elsie turned to smile at him as they walked. “ ’Tis sometimes better to let things be,” she said. Michael was like the men of her own family, set on having his own way and keeping close to his own idea of things. But he would listen to her, and she liked him for this—it was one of the things she liked most about him. “My uncle would be alive to this day if they had only let things be,” she said. She had been fond of this uncle, her mother’s brother, who had died in an accident at the pit some two years before, killed by a haphazard fall of stone from the mouth of the shaft. “They changed the work hours,” she said. “The men went off without puttin’ the timbers across where the stone was loose, an’ the basketman had just come on an’ he didn’t know it. Usual game, tryin’ to get more work out of the men for the same money.”

Anger had come with the words into her voice and into her
face. Michael made no answer, allowing silence to mark his agreement and sympathy. He knew the circumstances of Thomas Fenby’s death; pit deaths and injuries formed part of the collective knowledge of the colliery. But Elsie’s quickness of feeling was still strange to him. She had gone from a smile to a flare of anger in two shakes of a duck’s tail. “Look,” he said, with a certain relief at finding a change of subject. He pointed down at the path as it began to descend through the wooded slopes of the Dene. There were the trot marks of a fox in the dried clay.

There had been high winds in the previous days, and they could see a tangle of damage higher up on the slope, where the trees were more exposed. Branches had been torn from some of the elms there; they lay in a jagged debris of timber, the pale yellow of the breaks deepening to reddish in the core of the wood. In places the bark had been stripped off in the fall, leaving raw-looking, ocherous patches. Chaffinches fluttered among the tangle of boughs, repeating a single sharp note.

They fell silent as they went farther in. Both were aware of the momentousness of the occasion. Elsie was nearly eighteen. She had come here often as a child, with other children, played hide-and-seek, gathered primroses, splashed in the stream. But this had ended for her at the age of ten, when she had started working on the tips. Since then she had come only rarely. Girls did not go alone into the Dene, and it was not customary for women of any age to go on excursions of this sort together. Now it seemed to her altogether a different place, hushed and strange.

For Michael too these slopes felt unfamiliar and new. For the first time he felt truly alone with Elsie, in spite of the presence—felt by both—of others here, occasional muted voices and rustlings of movement among the trees.