The Quality of Mercy (24 page)

“I secure his person as the property of Mr. Lyons,” he said in loud tones.

Ashton saw two rough-looking men pressing behind, obviously hired for the occasion. Evans struggled to free his arm, but the captain held on to it. Newton’s face was red and congested-looking, and veins stood out at his temples. A sort of reciprocal rage of violence was aroused in Ashton, and he felt a sharp impulse to strike at the arm that was still holding Evans. Fortunately for him—he would have stood small chance in a physical conflict
with the captain—he heard Stanton’s voice immediately behind him: “Threaten to charge him with assault if he does not immediately release the man’s arm.”

“This man has been discharged by the court,” Ashton said. “There is no charge against him, he is free to leave. That document you are brandishing has no validity here. The issue of property must be decided in another court. Remove your hand from his arm at once, or I will issue an immediate summons of assault against you. There is no shortage of witnesses.”

He saw the fury in the captain’s eyes, saw the convulsive clenching of his jaw.

“Remove your hand from his person at once,” Ashton said.

Newton struggled with his rage some moments longer, then released Evans’s arm. “God damn your liver and your eyes,” he said. He turned away and his hirelings turned away with him, leaving Ashton swept by an exhilaration he had scarcely known himself capable of.

It was this release of triumphant joy that he began with when later that day he was telling Jane what had happened in the courtroom. “He had brute written all over him,” he said. “A brute of a slaving skipper. God help those unlucky enough to be subject to him when he is master of that small world of a ship—not so very small either, when we think of the hundreds of poor souls shackled below decks. I must confess that I felt a great surge of triumph when he was forced to let go of Evans. I felt that I was acting as God’s minister to see justice done, justice and mercy.”

“They are not often combined,” Jane said. She smiled at her brother with full affection. He had told her of his visit to the prison the day before, and now his account of events in the courtroom and the part he had played had aroused an ardent admiration in her, so completely were they in accord with her idea of how a man should bear himself in such circumstances, or a woman either, for that matter; she liked to think that she would have acted and spoken in the same way. “I am proud of you, Frederick,” she said, “and I am proud to be your sister.”

“Oh well, it was only for a few minutes, you know.” His tone was deprecating, but he was deeply pleased by her words and by the look on her face as she said them. “Just for those few minutes, I felt I was carrying out God’s wishes and his purposes. All the same, it is a most amazing thing that in this England of ours, nowadays so abounding in refined legal argument, with a new generation of penal theorists who claim to rest their policies on humanity and common sense, a man can be hauled off to prison, committed on a false order of custody and kept under lock and key for an indefinite period without any charge being made against him.”

He paused and shook his head, with the rueful smile common to him. There were degrees of corruption, as there were of all moral states. The venality of the keepers at the Poultry Compter, who would sell a man into captivity, seemed deeply criminal to him as compared to that of the starveling turnkeys he had encountered on his visit to Newgate Prison when he had gone there to speak to the surviving crew of the
Liverpool Merchant
.

“It is there we should begin,” Jane said. “It is there we should try to mend things. Not with theories and philosophies and adding wise books to the stacks of them already written, but seeing the wrongs and abuses where they are and striving together to mend them.”

“Yes,” Ashton said, though with some hesitation. It was a favorite theme of his sister’s—her face had lit up with enthusiasm as she spoke. But he had never been altogether in sympathy with it. Like trying to stop a flood with your hands, he thought. You needed a law that would block the source. In the meantime, of course, people got drowned.

“But even more amazing,” he said, “and almost defying belief, is that there and then, in the presence of the chief magistrate of the City of London, in his residence, in his court, after he had just declared a man free to go, this same brute of a ship’s captain, with two hired ruffians at his shoulders, should dare such a thing, should dare such open defiance. You will not believe it, but we
had to ask the mayor to provide us with an escort for Evans so we could get him away from the premises of the court without his being waylaid and carried off by those waiting outside.”

It had shocked him yet again, this blindly tenacious sense of property in another human being on no more grounds than that the skin was of a different color. It went far deeper than any question of value, the price Evans would fetch if brought to the slave market. Bolton and Lyons between them had already spent a good part of this on bribes and rewards. It was the presumption of absolute right, the sense of outrage when this—to them—natural order of things was disputed.

Jane had been out somewhere; it was only now that he noticed this by her dress—he had been too occupied with his account to notice it before. At once, by some obscure association of ideas, he thought of Erasmus Kemp. The two would not have met since the evening of the reception at Bateson’s house; Jane was not one to make assignations, and Kemp would know that visiting her at home was the only way of being granted a private conversation. She had not referred to Kemp since that evening, but Ashton remembered how they had disappeared together, how they had shut themselves away. The very absence of comment, in one so open and frank as Jane, was significant—or so he reasoned.

“I am glad that I was able to become acquainted with Mr. Kemp,” he said. “It is good to have a face and form for one’s adversaries.”

“Yes, I suppose he must be regarded as an adversary.” The word had no weight in her mind; there was only his face, the blaze of the dark eyes fixed on her own. As if he could only explain, only express himself, as if his purposes only seemed real to him while his gaze was locked on hers. As if only she could meet his need. He was everything her brother detested, everything she too should detest. A man who had founded his fortune on the sugar plantations, on slave labor. But he wanted to change, he wanted to build, to create, to improve the lot of common people …

“A lot of force in him,” Ashton said. “I am not sure what kind
of force it is. I would hesitate to call it moral. He seems equally intense in the pursuit of his financial interests as in the sphere of personal feeling. Not a man to sacrifice his time except on issues important to him, perhaps I can say dear to him. He was set on conversing privately with you, so much was clear to see.”

“It is true that he paid me particular attention.”

“Indeed, yes. That is to put it mildly.”

“He asked me if he might call when he returns from Durham.”

“And how did you answer him?”

“I consented to it.”

“I have been thinking … you know he is a very important figure in the Admiralty case that is pending—it is to be heard very shortly now. In fact it is he who has instituted the charges of mutiny and piracy. If it could be put to him that it is close to your heart, that you would be happy for a judgment favorable to our cause … If he could be persuaded to declare some change of mind, some new order of feeling—he has had time to consider and so on, he sees now that a charge of piracy cannot be sustained, as the negroes were not property, and those surviving much outnumbered the crew. He might even be brought to state the belief that the killing of the captain was justified, and even lawful, as it put a stop to a process of murder. In short, if he knew it was your wish, he might be prevailed upon to withdraw the suit and make a public statement of his reasons for so doing. Think what attention such a statement would receive, what a great triumph it would be for us, for the cause of abolition. Of course there is the evidence of eyewitnesses, but in the absence of a plaintiff, in the absence of anyone calling for a judgment, the case might founder—yes, it might founder …”

He had been walking back and forth, possessed by the splendor of this vision. Now he stopped and looked at her, perhaps becoming aware of her silence, the absence of approbation. He saw a look on her face he could not recall ever having seen there before, a look in which there was no slightest indulgence for
him. His sister was regarding him coldly, as one might look at a stranger, someone for whom there was no kindness.

“Do you really think that I would ask such a favor, such a large favor, on the strength of the acquaintance I have with Mr. Kemp, an hour of conversation, less than an hour? Do you not see that to ask such a thing of such a man as he is, as I sense him to be, or indeed of any man …”

The ugliness and unseemliness of her brother’s suggestion, coming so soon after her admiration for him, threatened her composure now, and her voice trembled as she continued. “Do you not see that it would mean, seem to mean, offering something … promising something in exchange? You are asking me, to serve your turn and without even any surety of the result you desire, to claim a right of property in him and thereby to put myself in his hands. How can you be so careless of your sister’s dignity? How can you be so coarse and selfish?”

“Selfish?” he began. “Selfish when I have at heart the liberation from bondage of many thousands, whose faces I do not even—”

But she swept out of the room without waiting for him to finish.

Jane was to see Erasmus Kemp again sooner than she had expected, before his departure for Durham in fact, as the case against the surviving members of the crew of the
Liverpool Merchant
was heard at the Old Bailey only three days after the quarrel between brother and sister.

Despite the constraint that still existed between them, she accompanied him to the courthouse, though with divided motives, as she fully admitted to herself. There was the long habit of support for her brother, her sympathy for the cause so dear to him; and there was the wish, felt no less strongly, to see Erasmus again—for it was certain that he would be there.

It was not the first time that Ashton had attended a hearing at the Court of King’s Bench, but he had never lost his sense of the strange isolation, in the midst of the bustle of the city, that the Old Bailey conveyed as one drew near to it. Once one had turned off the busy thoroughfare connecting Newgate Street and Ludgate Street, the only approach to the courtyards and outbuildings, and to the Sessions House itself, was by means of a single narrow alleyway, and as one proceeded along this the rattle of wheels and the cries of the street vendors fell away behind one.

They emerged onto the Sessions Yard, where a considerable number of people had already gathered, most of them there to
watch the proceedings and hear what they could, but there was a scattering of turnkeys and court attendants and some witnesses waiting to be called. Ashton saw Barton and James Porter, the ship’s interpreter, among them.

They passed through the gate into the bail dock, where what was left of the crew of the
Liverpool Merchant
were chained and under guard. Hughes was the only one of them to meet Ashton’s eye as he passed, and it was the same look of ferocious hostility that he remembered from the time when he had questioned the men in the prison yard. They crossed the dock and were admitted through one of the gates flanking the portico and led by an attendant to the places reserved for them in the gallery overlooking the court.

Erasmus Kemp was there already, in the balcony on the other side of the courtroom, almost exactly opposite them. He and Ashton inclined their heads in the barest of greetings. Jane made no motion of greeting, but when she raised her eyes to look at him she found his gaze fixed on her, the space between them was canceled, and it was as though they were continuing some conversation, close together in a pause between words. Just so he had looked at her on the terrace of Bateson’s house, excluding all the other people there, all the rest of the world. She was stirred by the memory and by something close to pity for him in his tenacity, so strong as to make him seem helpless, though still she was flattered by it. Thereafter she did not meet his eyes again.

The judges now entered from the upper floor, where they had been assisted in donning their scarlet robes and full-bottomed wigs. All those present in the courtroom rose to their feet as the Lord High Admiral, with the Lord Commissioners on either side of him and the Chief Justice of Common Pleas following behind, mounted the steps to the judges’ bench and took their places. When they were seated the High Marshal of the Admiralty advanced, bearing the emblem of authority, the replica of a silver oar, which he laid on the table before the judges. The jurors, having been assembled in the Yard, now entered and took their
places in the enclosures on either side. The crier called for silence and Kemp’s lawyer, Pike, rose to open the case for the prosecution.

The first witness to be called was one Captain Philips, a stout, bluff-featured man recently retired from the sea and resident in London. He related to the court that in the year 1765, while passing through the Florida Straits bound for Norfolk, Virginia, he had anchored at a latitude of some 27 degrees, south of a point on the coast known as the Boca Nueva. He had sent a party ashore to take water from the fresh springs he knew to be there, and gather firewood and shoot any game they came across. These men had returned to tell him of finding the remains of a ship named the
Liverpool Merchant
, and he, aware of the general belief that the ship had been lost at sea with all aboard her, had gone ashore himself and found the story to be true. He had felt it his duty, on returning to London, to inform the ship’s owner, Mr. Erasmus Kemp, of the discovery.

Horace Stanton, for the defense, endeavored to show that the mere discovery of a wrecked ship did not prove any intention on the part of the crew to remain in Florida and evade justice. “Shipwrecks occur, do they not?” he said to the captain. “Is it not true that those waters are treacherous to ships that come too close in?”