The Quality of Mercy (27 page)

“Well, but the two men were pardoned, after all.”

“Having first been found guilty. That was not Stanton’s aim, nor was it Ashton’s. They wanted them all acquitted. The Lord Admiral, on the other hand, wanted to show that he it is who doles
out justice and mercy. In the right measure and proportion, of course.” Pike smiled and raised his glass. “He and no one else,” he said. “Here is to the law, sir. If the judge had not wished to assert his prerogatives, those two would probably have been condemned to death along with the rest.”

Kemp nodded. “I see, yes.” But even as they drank together, even though grateful to Pike for his efforts, he found his old disapproval returning, and for the same reason. Pike made light of the institution that gave him his reputation and his living—a good living too. It was ungrateful; it was even duplicitous. And Pike grew aware of it now, as before, this disapproval, and as before felt a kind of contempt for it, the lack of humor, the rigidity of mind, impelling him—and this too not for the first time—to do further outrage to his client’s sense of propriety. Propriety and property, the fellow’s guiding lights …

“I am not altogether sure that it was wise to appeal to the jury’s sense of common humanity either,” he said. “Or to urge them to imagine the state of mind of the crew on that distant morning.”

“I don’t see much wrong in that.”

“The jury is open to pity, both singly and by a sort of contagion, as are we all. But the ability to imagine the thoughts and feelings of others is a great deal rarer than might be thought, and people will quickly grow hostile if urged to exercise a faculty they do not possess. Nor will they always wish to share their humanity with the accused persons in the dock, especially when these persons are common seamen, and ragged and penniless into the bargain. They would rather recognize common humanity in persons more closely resembling themselves, or better still, persons higher up in the scale of things. The jurors are men of property, sir, they are landowners. Small landowners, to be sure, but landowners nevertheless. There is a property qualification at present set at fifteen pounds a year.”

“That is very little.”

“Indeed it is, sir, indeed it is. But it must be remembered that probably close on three-quarters of the inhabitants of this great
city will be too poor even to pay taxes, much less be in possession of freehold or copyhold to any extent of value at all. This huge mass of humanity lies just below the noses of the jurors. They can smell it, sir. Their greatest fear is to slide back down into it.”

He paused for some moments, raising his glass to drink. With the case ended and his connection with his client about to be dissolved, he felt a lightening of the oppression he had always felt in Kemp’s company. “No,” he said, “they want to share their common humanity with the creditor, the landlord, the masters of ships, the employers of labor. And these last want to share their common humanity with those of wider acres and larger possessions.”

“Well,” Kemp said, “it is natural for men to want to better themselves.”

“So it is. And the trick of it, in the courts, is to play on this natural wish as much as possible. That is why I spoke as I did of the mob. The fear of the mob is stronger among those who have small possessions, because they are closer in dealings and in neighborhood to people of violent and disorderly life. And the fear has grown stronger than ever in these last years, with the fluctuations in the price of bread and the rioting that has resulted. It is not a month since the militia had to be called out again. The protestors were more than a thousand strong, and they would not disperse until a dozen of them had been shot.”

Kemp drank some more of his wine without making any immediate reply. He felt that justice had been done that day, in the main at least—two had escaped, but five would hang. There was Sullivan too, still at large. His long journey, the time he had lost, the money he had spent, the rightness of his cause—all had been justified by the verdict and the sentence. But this quick-tongued fellow made no mention of that, dwelling instead on tricks and ploys. “We were in the right and that was recognized by the court,” he said at last, resolving to take his leave before very much longer. The other’s way of looking at the world was distasteful to him; Pike took everything together, as if the distinction between right and wrong were shadowy and obscure, when every man of good
character knew that it was abundantly clear. And yet there was no indulgence, no complacency of acceptance in the lawyer’s tone; his voice had an edge to it, in spite of the smiles, something of bitterness even, as if he would change things if he could.

“The thing most to be hoped for,” the lawyer said now, “is that the common run of people, that great riotous mass within the range of the nostrils of those with fifteen pounds a year, people who have never owned anything, who could hardly be said to own themselves, might somehow be persuaded to share their common humanity with the property-owning classes and help to keep them in their places, in the hope that by so doing they will be more likely to become property owners themselves.”

Pike did not exactly smile as he said these words, but he stretched his mouth and shook his head slowly, in a way that seemed theatrical to Kemp, making him suspect that the lawyer was not entirely serious in what he said, whereas he himself found the words eminently reasonable and felt they represented a hope for a better and safer society. “Not many would realize such an ambition,” he said. “One in a hundred, perhaps. But it would be of great benefit to public order and the security of the realm. Fewer windows would be broken, fewer people would be shot.”

“Indeed, sir,” Pike said, though still with an expression that seemed to Kemp less than properly earnest. “Above all, it would give the people hope. Hope deferred, sir, hope of betterment endlessly deferred, that is what binds people together.”

“I suspect that your adversary of today would see the matter differently,” Kemp said, as he rose to his feet.

“Stanton? I have known Horace Stanton for a good many years now. We have met both in the courtroom and out of it. An excellent advocate, with great resources of feeling—and that makes for effective argument, you know, juries can be swayed by feeling when they are not closed off from it by fear. All the same, Stanton has one great fault.”

“What is that?”

Pike smiled slightly and looked directly into Kemp’s eyes as the
two men shook hands. “He needs always to believe he is entirely in the right, which no one can ever be, you know.”

Kemp was more than halfway home, quite close to Aldwych, before it came to him that Pike’s final words had been aimed at him as much as at Stanton, that the lawyer had wanted to give him something in the nature of a parting shot. Following immediately on this realization there came a strange, extremely unwelcome feeling of envy for Pike. Pike didn’t need to feel justified, he didn’t need to feel in full possession of the truth, he could go this way or that, he could stand back and take a look and choose, he needed no blessing, no angelic guidance. Pike was a free man.

So perverse and appalling to him was this feeling that he spent the rest of the way home rebutting it, repairing the breach, restoring his previous disapproval of the lawyer. What was such freedom worth? Pike had no goals, no overriding purposes. He shifted with circumstance, he could recite any part. How could such a life be tolerable? He himself was soon to depart for Durham, and his goals were clear to him: he would survey the mine, he would determine what was needed, he would improve working methods, achieve higher production and increased profits. These were things that a man could aim at, could believe in. He it was who had a firm grip on reality, not Pike. On his return home he would call on Jane Ashton, he would have her face before him, he would tell her of the plans he had made during the time of their separation. One day, but not just yet, he would ask her if she had been at the Spring Gardens that night, the night of the fireworks.

“Lookin’ at it another way,” Sullivan said to the man working beside him, “I had the woman before they took me off, so me money was not lost an’ obliterated intoirely, I had some value from it. I am not the man to deny that, though the pleasure was fleetin’.”

“No regrets, that’s my motto,” the man said. “I never ’ave no regrets. There is bad things that happen, but we still got our arms and legs, ain’t we?”

“I was expectin’ her to tell them misbegotten creatures that the money belonged to the both of us, that it was joint stock, to use the language of commerce. But she kept mum, she had no scrap of a notion of sharin’. If she had spoke up, I would niver have found meself here in this workhouse.”

“Well, whores is various, one from another. They have all got the same thing between their legs, but their character is widely different. No regrets—next time you might come across a good ’un.”

Side by side at their task of plaiting strands of hemp fiber into rope, they spoke in low tones so as not to attract the attention of the overseer.

“This work is takin’ the skin off me fingers,” Sullivan said. “It will reduce the power of me music. I will have the law of them for robbin’ me of me livelihood. I am not the man to deny that there is
always the prospect of a rainbow just round the corner, but what I am sayin’ is that them watchmen would niver have fetched me here if that woman had shown a drop or two of the milk of human kindness.”

His companion was a thinly clad, emaciated man with a light of fever in his eyes. “Them was not reg’lar watchmen,” he said now. “Far from it. You won’t find reg’lar watchmen goin’ round at night lookin’ for vagrants, you will find them at home by the fire.”

“I thought as much. I knew there was somethin’ about them fellers that didn’t tally. I suspected somethin’ from the start. I wasn’t born yesterday, I told them, show me your badge of office, I said, but of course there was no answer forthcomin’.”

“What it is, you see, they farms it out. The watchman what is appointed by the parish has the task of bringin’ in vagrants wherever he can find them. He gets fourpence a head. So he hires two men to do the rounds in his place, an’ for every one they brings in he gives them a penny each. He halves his fee, but he stays at home out of trouble. An’ he gets his wages in any case, a shillin’ a day.”

He paused here for a series of racking coughs, and the man on the other side of Sullivan, who had drawn near enough to hear these last words, now broke in. He was a stocky man with reddish hair and a rhetorical style of speech. “What are we doin’ here?” he said. “We are wearin’ our fingers to the bone, makin’ rope. Do we get paid for our labor? No, we don’t. What do we get to eat? Stale bread an’ thin gruel. Who makes the profit? Them that sells the rope an’ them that runs the workhouse.”

“He is right,” the other said, having recovered from his fit of coughing. “I been in bridewells before, more than once. I get brought in for diff’rent reasons—this time it was for beggin’. No regrets. But it is always the same story once you get here. They will set you to work. I been set on to makin’ candlewick for the chandlers, pickin’ feathers for the mattress makers, beatin’ old bricks to dust for the brickmakers. I can’t do heavy work no more,
because of my chest—it was the brick dust done that. An’ never a penny for any of it.”

“No choice an’ no pay an’ benefitin’ only the manufacturers,” Sullivan said. “That is forced labor an’ I will denounce it to the proper authorities once I get free from here.”

“Don’t do that,” the red-haired man said. “Why not? Because you will end up in prison. On what charge? Bein’ a public nuisance. Punishment? A good whippin’ an’ a term of hard labor.”

“One hand washes the other,” the other man said. “Mootual benefit they calls it. The manufacturers give somethin’ out of their profits to them that run the workhouse.”

“I see well they have worked out a good system. I know somethin’ of the law, bein’ a traveled man, an’ I know that you cannot keep a man confined without lawful cause. How can empty pockets be a lawful cause? There is a paper you can get, with writin’ that says you have got the body in captivity, show reason or deliver it up. But how can you get hold of a paper like that when you are the body that has to be delivered up?”

“What is a vagrant?” the red-haired man demanded. “He is someone down on his luck. Who has the right to call his fellow man a vagrant? No one. Why do they do it? They do it so they can own that man an’ sell his labor.”

“It is the same when they cart you off from here,” the other said. “You are a charge on this parish where you are now. When you have done your time here, it is for them to remove you to your own parish an’ pay the cost. But a lot of us ain’t got no parish, or none that will own to us. No regrets. An’ nobody wants to spend money on us in any case. So they gives you a pass that takes you to the next parish an’ they carries you there on a cart. The constable that gets paid for the cartin’ farms it out to others what will do it for less. If he gets twopence a head for the people in the cart, the one that does the cartin’ might get a ha’penny or three farthings. An’ all you gets is a ride to the next parish, where they will be waitin’ to put you in the workhouse again. Everyone is makin’ money on you. Vagrants is very good for business.”

“When they asks you where is your place of settlement,” the man on the other side of Sullivan said, “what do you tell them? You tells them you want to return to Ireland an’ start your life anew. Why do you tell them that? Because you know that they will never send you back there, not in a hundred years. Why not? Because it costs too much. So what do they do? They takes you to the nearest county border an’ dumps you there.”

“The nearest county border is the border of Durham County, if I am not mistaken,” Sullivan said. “Holy Mother, you don’t mean to say that they will take me on a cart to Durham free of charge?”

It was a mark of Ashton’s resilience that not many hours after his fury of disappointment at the piracy verdict, and still suffering from it, he set himself to considering the next battle to fight. The cause of abolition, which had rescued him from a prevailing sense of futility and made him profoundly grateful to Divine Providence for such redemption, had at the same time brought him to a fuller knowledge of himself, his capacity for devotion, his readiness to spend everything he had, all his resources, health and strength included, in the fight against a traffic in human souls offensive to God and man alike.