The Quality of Mercy (29 page)

By orders of the Admiralty, those convicted of piracy were hanged with a shortened rope, so that the drop would not be long enough to break the men’s necks. Calley was whimpering as they adjusted the noose and might have fallen to his knees if one of the assistants had not held him up. Rimmer spoke to the executioner and it seemed that he joked, for both men smiled. At the last moment Barber raised his head and called out in a loud voice, “God have mercy on us!”

Then the drop was released and there were no more words and only the movements that men make when they are fighting for breath. Hughes watched this terrible slow strangling of men he deemed guiltless, waited through the frenzied jerking of their limbs—the marshal’s dance, as it was called, because of the raising of the knees and the shivering of the body below the waist.

He stood still there while the struggle lasted, waited while the bodies were taken down and chained to the stakes, which were already being lapped by the incoming tide. He remained in his place as the water rose and slowly submerged the bodies, rising over their chests and finally covering their bowed heads. He knew the procedure, as did all those who had followed the sea. They would remain chained there for the space of time it would take for three full tides to rise over their heads. Then their bodies would be smeared with pitch, taken to the Isle of Dogs, hung on gibbets and left there to rot.

When he finally moved away, it was with the sense of solemn farewell renewed in his mind. He knew more clearly now why he had not wanted the leavetaking to be cheapened by words of recognition and farewell. The silence was pure; it gave sanctity, and
an endorsement from beyond the grave, to his vow that he would visit the same fate on Barton.

This vow he nursed in the days that followed, allowing no doubt to enter, no lessening of resolve. He felt that he owed his life to the promise he had made in that moment when the mate was passing before him, and this gave him a feeling of dedication he had never known before.

He spent his days at the Gravesend docks, doing what work came his way, sleeping rough. It was here, where the river began to widen, that the slave ships were fitted out. Barton would sign on for a slaver when his Judas money ran out. It was work he knew, the wages were slightly better, he might think to be taken on again as mate.

After twelve days Hughes’s patience was rewarded. There was a ship fitting out, the
Indian Prince
, that carried the stench of the trade and had the build—high in the stern, so that the swivel guns could more easily be brought to bear on the deck in case of slave revolt, thickened at the rails to make death leaps more difficult. One evening he saw Barton coming down the gangplank, following a man in a long coat and cocked hat, who looked like the skipper. He guessed they were bound on a mission to make up the number of the crew, enlist the men they needed, either by force or persuasion. If this was so, the ship must be ready to cast off her moorings and move out into the Pool.

He waited through that night, saw two men dragged aboard by those that had been hired to do it, saw the return of Barton. At dawn the wind shifted and the tide began to ebb. The ship was roped to her tugboats, her moorings were loosed and she was towed out to the deeper water of the estuary. While she lay there, in the last hour before her sailing, Hughes paid what money remained to him to be rowed out to the ship. He climbed aboard her, gave his name to the bosun and signed on with his mark. It was only now, when the anchor was weighed and it was too late to quit the ship, that Barton came up from below and saw him. Hughes was smiling, a rare thing indeed.

Sullivan, once more in possession of his fiddle and bow, shared the cart with three fellow vagrants, who like himself were being passed on to the nearest county border. They were set down just north of the Tees, a day’s walk from Darlington, and from here they went their separate ways.

On the outskirts of Darlington Sullivan came upon a cattle market and a few stalls offering eggs and cheeses for sale. There were a good number of people about and he decided to give them a song or two. He took up a position at a good distance from the compound where the beasts were herded and the auctioneer was shouting, and began with “Ned of the Hill,” a lyric he had always been partial to.

Lingering tunes and words of love stopped people in their tracks sometimes, as he had learned early; they could work just
as well as a more lilting start. And he liked this song because he could feel at one with the sentiment as he sang; he was the outlaw minstrel, the words of invitation were his and he put a lot of feeling into them.

As the time passed, there was a scattering of farthings on his spread waistcoat, and he kept a close eye on them; it was not unknown for a fiddling man to have his earnings scooped up and fled away with if he got too lost in his music. He was so near his goal now, there had been so many mishaps along the way; he was resolved to be careful, make no mistakes, keep a guard on his money. He was not quite sure what he would do when his vow was fulfilled and his compact with the Holy Mother carried faithfully through. He would then be like the wrestler he had met on the road, of whom he sometimes thought, wandering from place to place, getting older. He might lay his fiddle aside and seek work on a coaster, carrying freight down south or across the sea to Holland. But the
Liverpool Merchant
had given him enough of the sea to last a lifetime. He was well past his first youth and did not really care for the idea of hauling on the ropes again and risking a rupture.

It took him four days to reach the village of Thorpe, place of his pilgrimage, and he was never to forget his first sight of it. He approached through high, moorland country, and a turn in the road brought him in late afternoon to a sudden view of the village lying below him. This, then, was where Billy Blair had come from, this was what he had run away from. Four streets, seventy or eighty low-built, crouching houses with gray slate roofs. The sulfurous smoke from coal fires lay like a mist over the whole village, hanging motionless under an overcast sky. He saw what looked like a store at the crossing of the streets, and close to this a stone-built tavern. Beyond the shrouded houses he saw the vaporous gleam of salt pans, and the sour smell of heated brine carried to him. Seen thus from above, it seemed like a vision of the inferno to Sullivan, with in the far distance the dark silver,
luminous strip of the sea, like a land of the blessed, a promise lost forever to these souls succumbing amid the smoke. It was as if this dark cluster of houses had been set down within the fields to live in eternal malodor, and for no other reason.

The sight of the sea brought him a sort of reversed memory: standing off the coast of Africa, looking from sea to land, the smoke rising from the shore fires, first sign of life, announcing that there were slaves for sale. Then the fumes of smoke from the deck, like an answer, rising from the braziers where they were bringing the branding irons to red heat.

As he descended the long slope and drew nearer to the village, he heard the hiss and clank that came from the shafts of the mine, and saw here and there, approaching the village from the fields beyond, figures walking slowly, as if summoned by these noises. He saw with something of a shock that their faces were black. He was an impressionable man, and he had never seen a mining village before. He was so taken with the sooty, infernal looks of the returning miners that it did not occur to him to ask himself what these people would make of a wild-haired, staring, shambling man with a fiddle over his shoulder. He had cause to do this, however, not much later. As he came to the foot of the slope, where the ground leveled out and the moor gave way to rough pastureland, he saw the figures of children running this way and that in the field next to the one he was crossing. Five or six small figures he made out. He could see no pattern in their movements at first, they seemed aimless; then he saw the dip and rise of some fluttering creature struggling to be free, flying trammeled in a way no bird could have flown, and he realized, as he drew nearer, that the boys were flying a kite, diamond-shaped, with long, trailing streamers.

Intent on watching the erratic plunges and soarings of the kite, the children did not see him until he was through the gate in the hedge and halfway across the field where they were. “Hey, lads!” he shouted, raising his right arm in greeting. For some moments
they stared at him across the decreasing distance. Then, without the slightest pause or consultation among themselves, three of them took flight in the direction of the first houses of the village.

The boy managing the kite was Percy Bordon, and he could not run without letting go of the bobbin that held the string and so consigning the kite to the final freedom of the skies. For a moment or two, as alarmed as his mates by this apparition with a mane of hair and a stump growing out of his shoulder, he thought of doing this. But the kite was precious to him, and he was heartened by the fact that Billy had stayed by him and not run off with the others, though nothing had impeded him from doing so.

Then, as the stranger drew nearer, both boys saw that he was not deformed with an extra limb but was merely carrying something slung over one shoulder. And Sullivan, for his part, having understood that he was a fearsome figure, stopped at a distance of some yards and did not come any closer.

“I had no wish to startle you,” he said. “That is a fine kite.”

“My da made it,” Percy said. “He made it an’ he give it me.”

“Did he so? I see well that you are a lucky boy. What might your name be?”

“Percy Bordon.”

“An’ your friend here that stayed beside you when the others ran away?”

“He is Billy Scotland.” Emboldened by the gentleness of the stranger’s voice, he added, “He is my best friend. We are the same age—him an’ me are gannin’ doon the pit together this year.”

“It is a great blessin’ to have a faithful friend,” Sullivan said.

Billy now spoke for the first time. “A was waitin’ my turn for the kite,” he said. “Tha talks funny.”

“Well, so do you for that matter. Do you know if there is someone by the name of Blair livin’ here in the village?”

The answer to this was delayed, because the kite, which Percy had taken his eyes off during this conversation, now encountered some mischievous downward current and after struggling some moments took a sharp tilt and came to rest on the ground, where
it lay disheveled, its streamers still fluttering slightly, like an expiring bird, while Billy ran to retrieve it.

“Kites will not hurt themselves when they fall,” Sullivan said, and a vague memory came to him of his boyhood in Galway, helping to fly a kite that never belonged to him, always to someone else. “Me father made me a kite once,” he lied.

“My uncle John has Blair for his name,” Percy said. “That is my mother’s brother an’ he lives in our street.”

Sullivan looked at the boy with a sudden closer scrutiny. The cropped hair and snub nose, the blue eyes and fair lashes, something pugnacious in the small face—he could see, or persuaded himself that he could see, a resemblance. This was Billy’s nephew, then. Billy would have been proud of the lad.

“Well now, Percy,” he said, “I see you are a good boy as well as a lucky one. I am not the man to go intrudin’ into people’s homes, causin’ disconcertment an’ disarray. When you go home now, will you tell your mother that there is a travelin’ man with news of her long-lost brother, name of Billy Blair, who run away to sea. Perhaps she would ask her man to come over an’ have a word with me. I will be waitin’ in the alehouse. There is an alehouse, as I believe? It is a poor place indeed that has niver an alehouse.”

“Yes,” Percy said. “They call it the Miner’s Home.”

“Well, it will be home to a fiddlin’ man for the time bein’. Will you do that for me now? Will you promise to tell me words to your good mother?”

“Yes, a s’ll tell her soon as a get home,” Percy said. “What is that hangin’ on yor shoulder?”

Sullivan did his best to explain what a fiddle was but did not meet with much success, so he took up the instrument and played the tune of “I’ll Away No More.” This had a strong effect on both boys, and in fact it was what Percy began with when he got back home and spoke to his mother. The music and the way the man moved his elbow, now quick, now slow, and the strange look of him and his strange way of talking. Only after this did he remember to pass on Sullivan’s message, and when he did so he saw his
mother’s face change. She reached and took a grip on his shoulder. “He said he had news of our Billy?”

“He said so.” His uncle Billy was something more than a name to him, but not much; a figure in a distant story, a lad who had run away from the coal. He was taken aback by this seriousness of his mother’s, and could think of nothing more to say than what he had said already. “He had long hair an’ he seemed to be lookin’ at sommat else all the time an’ he talked funny an’ he said that it was us who talked funny but it was him that did, an’ then he played sommat on this fiddle he was carryin’, there is strings stretched over an’ tha scrapes across with a stick.”

“An’ he said he would be waitin’ at the alehouse?”

“Aye.”

“Well,” Nan said, “he can bide where he is for a bit. A s’ll have to wait for Bordon. A canna gan there on my own an’ he canna come here till Bordon is back from work an’ washed an’ ready.”

And so it came about that Sullivan waited longer at a quiet time of day and drank rather more ale than he had foreseen, which was fortunate in various ways. It led to a franker conversation with the keeper of the alehouse than might otherwise been the case, and it led to his getting a good look at a widow woman named Sally Cartwright, who served there.