The Quality of Mercy (3 page)

But Bordon’s rage had died as he listened, and weariness had returned. The voices of quarrel still came from the village, sounds ugly and discordant, so much at odds with those he had emerged from, which had seemed part of the silence. “Take it personal?” he said. “The manage dinna pay them fellers. Him that owns the mine, Lord Spenton, he dinna pay neether. Every man jack of us is docked tuppence a week, as you know well, Saul Parrish. That is personal enough, an’t it? Them that pays should have a say in the runnin’ of it.”

“It’s as well nobody but us is listening,” Hill said. “Those are words that could be took wrong.”

Bordon shrugged. “Bad cess to them that would take it so,” he said. He had long suspected Hill for a tale-bearer. Then, realizing he had made a sort of joke, though by accident, he smiled a little. “You two gan on,” he said. “A’ll stay here till they’ve done.”

He lingered in the lane for some time longer, greeting the men who passed but remaining alone. Only when the cart was gone did he start to make his way toward the village. He knew now, rage spent, that he had been wrong in what he had said about the nettie men; he knew they came on various days, he knew there was no plot. He had been angered at the sight and sound of them because washing day was always Saturday and it was the day he looked forward to most in the working week, the clean shirt and trousers, the prospect of rest next day.

There was free coal for all the mining families and fires were kept up all day, in all seasons. Nan was waiting for him with the water already heated for his bath. She was the only woman of the house; their one daughter had died in early childhood. The two older sons worked longer hours than their father, fourteen hours a day, dragging the loaded baskets along the workways from the coal face. It would be after dark when they returned; at this season they saw full daylight only on Sundays.

The hip bath was brought out and set before the fire, the hot water poured out from the big copper pan and mixed with the cold brought in from the well in the alley. His clean clothes were laid over a kitchen chair; there was the pipe to enjoy afterward. He looked at Nan’s face as she ministered to him, and felt a concern for her that came close to sorrow. She had had to endure that chaos and rage with the other women, after the long day of washing, the poss tub, the mangle, the tall lines to reach up to. There was weariness in her face, but no trace of anger; she was intent, pouring clean water from a tin mug over his shoulders and back.

“A saw our Percy in the Dene,” he said. “He was racin’ with birch boats in the beck. A dinna know if he saw me watchin’.”

“He wouldna have knowed it was you, all black from the pit. Men are different inside of them but tha canna tell much difference on the outside till they wash the coal off.”

Different inside they were indeed, she thought, whether clean washed or not. Bordon was subject to rages and there was violence in him, but it was never directed at her. From the day she had agreed to marry him he had tried to protect her as far as he could; he had wanted her to stop working at the pithead, sorting the shale and slate from the heaped coal, work she had started at the age of nine. It had meant a sacrifice of money, but he had insisted. There were some who made their wives labor at the mine even when they were advanced in pregnancy.

His hair had thinned in these last two or three years; she could feel the small ridges of the scars that ran over his scalp. He was taller than average, and the only protection any of them had was
the cloth cap; he did not always remember to stoop enough, and so he banged and bloodied his head against the roofs of the galleries as he passed.

“It minded me of doin’ the same when a was that age,” he said. He turned his head in an effort to look at her through the blur of the water. Percy’s age was frequently in their minds nowadays; this summer would see the end of childhood for him, set him on the long course of becoming a pitman. It was not something to be much talked about, any more than other obvious facts of life. Percy himself was ready to go down, as his brothers had done before him; but he was the last of their children, and both felt a sense of regret they had not felt for the others.

“He should be gettin’ back home by now,” Nan said. Then, after a moment, “He does well to play while he can.”

“Just in that selfsame place,” he said, closing his eyes, seeing the place again. “The beck runs fast there.”

He was dressed and had finished his tea by the time Michael and David came home. They came back together, as happened now and then, when their hours of work coincided.

There was no hot water for them—that was the privilege of the head of the family. They took buckets to the well that was shared by all the houses in their alley, brought the water back to their own yard and washed down there. Their only light was a candle lamp, but it was enough for Michael to see that his twelve-year-old brother, with the coal dust washed away, had livid bruises on his arms and legs. “How did tha get them marks?” he said.

David was reluctant to say. Stoicism came naturally to him; bruises of whatever kind were part of the life of the pit; it did not seem manly to complain, he did not want to look a weakling in his admired elder brother’s eyes. But as they fumbled their working clothes back on again in the cold yard, Michael persisted, and finally got the answer that confirmed the suspicions he had held for some time now. David worked as putter’s mate with a man named Daniel Walker; together they loaded the coal hacked out by the hewers, together they hauled and pushed the
loaded sledges along the gallery ways to the pit bottom, where the quantities were tallied and the corves winched up to the surface. This was piecework; they were paid by the quantity of the coal they shifted. It seemed that Walker, thinking to spur David on to greater efforts, frequently struck him with his fists on the arms and shoulders and kicked him on the legs.

“Is tha doin’ the best tha can to share the work?”

“Yes,” David said, with some indignation at this slur on him. “A canna do more, a canna gan faster.”

“An’ yon fool thinks he can make you do more by hittin’ you?”

David made no reply to this, standing there with his face averted, as if he had done some wrong. And this unhappy silence, this childish guilt at the fault of another, moved Michael and angered him at the same time. “Right then,” he said. “A’ll have a word or two with Walker.”

It was two days before Erasmus Kemp learned of Sullivan’s escape. The news was delivered by the barrister in charge of his case, Thomas Pike, who had himself only heard of it the day before.

“Why was I not told at once?” It was always congenial to Kemp to have someone before him on whom to lay the blame, and Pike had now to withstand the glare of the dark eyes in the level-browed, handsome face. Twenty years Kemp’s senior, one of the most eminent advocates in London, Pike had nevertheless to call on reserves of fortitude to meet this regard without demeaning himself by lowering his eyes. The passionate suddenness of his client’s moods still sometimes took him by surprise, combined as it was with a certain rigidness of bearing, slight but noticeable, unusual in so young a man. No doubt due to pride and self-consequence, the lawyer had thought—Kemp was known to be extremely rich; but there was a guardedness in it, as if he were afraid of jarring some old hurt.

“That is a question for the prison authorities, sir, not for me,” he said in a tone he took care to make neutral.

Kemp checked the angry response that rose to his lips at this impertinence—for he took it as such. Calculation was as prompt with him as rage; Pike was a highly successful lawyer, prosperous
enough to allow himself the liberty to take offense and abandon the case if he so chose. A mistake to antagonize him … His very presence there, in his client’s place of business instead of his own, constituted no small concession.

“How did it happen?”

“It seems that one of the debtors was playing host in his room in the prison, one of the upper rooms of course, those on the fourth floor, well removed from all the misery below. Friends of his and women of the streets, you understand. They ordered up cakes and wine in good quantity.” Pike paused to allow himself a discreet smile. “They cannot pay their debts, but they can always contract new ones, even in prison. Some musicians were ordered for the dancing. Four, I believe. The fiddler was drunk on arrival, though no one seems to have noticed it. He was handed a bumper and it was one too many for him, he could not keep on his feet. There is no dancing without a fiddle, and this Sullivan, who apparently is noted as a fiddler, was released from his chains and brought up to take the man’s place. The jollities went on till well past midnight. In the meantime the jailors were changed and no one thought to pass on the word about Sullivan. So when the musicians finally left, he left with them.”

“Why was he not immediately pursued?”

“This was in the early hours of the morning. By the time it was discovered the man would have been well clear of the prison, and there was no way of knowing which road he had taken. Sir, there are not officers enough in London to conduct a search of that kind.”

A short laugh broke from Kemp, though his face showed no change. “I cross the Atlantic to bring these men to justice. I spend weeks in Florida, enrolling the force of troops I shall need. I spend further weeks discovering the whereabouts of the miscreants and tracking them down. All this at great expense and to the neglect of my business. And now this wretch strolls out of prison, and no one thinks any more of it till next day, several hours later.”

“That seems to be the case, yes.”

“I shall lodge a complaint. I shall see that those responsible are dismissed. You will understand my displeasure, sir. I have related the circumstances in which my father’s ship was lost.”

The lawyer nodded. Even without this relation he would have known a great deal of the case. The impending trial was complicated; in fact, there would be two hearings, one civil, the second criminal. It had aroused considerable interest in legal circles, and the London newspapers had all contained accounts of it, embellished by a good deal of gossip. Kemp’s career had become public property in the course of the last two weeks, described in detail: the obscure beginnings in Liverpool, son of a bankrupt cotton merchant; the marrying into money in the person of Sir Hugo Jarrold’s daughter, an unhappy match by all accounts. Then the fortune made in sugar, the partnership in his father-in-law’s bank—he was head of the bank now, the old man never appeared in public, it was thought that his mind had gone. Kemp had returned from Florida to news of his wife’s death.

“I swore I would see them all hanged,” Kemp said. “The loss of ship and cargo ruined my father. And now one of them walks free, as if he had done no more than raid a chicken house.”

“Well, he could be hanged for that, as the times go,” Pike said. He remained silent for some moments, regarding the man opposite him. The bitterness of these last words had brought Kemp forward in his chair. He had raised his hands in speaking, causing pale ripples of reflection on the polished ebony surface of the desk at which he was sitting. He had a habit of occasional rapid gesture unusual among English people, at odds with that slight stiffness of bearing. The darkness of his eyes and hair and the olive tint of his complexion, these too were unusual. He was dressed with sober elegance in clothes that were fashionable but not ostentatiously so: a solitaire in the cravat, coat of dark blue velvet, cut away at the front to show a white silk waistcoat, unembroidered, buttoned in the new style, all the way down to the hem; he wore no wig and no powder on the hair, which was tied behind
with a single ribbon. It was the dress of a man who gave a great deal of thought to the figure he made.

“They will hang, be assured of it,” the lawyer said. “They killed the captain, but that was in the course of a scuffle, confused in its nature—it might be difficult to establish responsibility. No, it is the sailing off with the cargo of negroes that will be viewed more seriously, as constituting piracy, an aggravated form of theft, an outrage against property. There is no country in Europe where a man or woman or child, especially of the poorer classes, is more likely to be hanged for offenses against property than this great country of ours. According to Blackstone’s
Commentaries
, that are presently being published, there are in this year of grace 1767 no fewer than one hundred and sixty capital statutes, an increase of a hundred since the beginning of the century. And they are growing day by day. Murder, rape, maliciously cutting hop binds, destroying the heads of fishponds, waging war against the king in his realm—all are equally likely to get you standing room on the cart to Tyburn. In theory, at least. Whether juries will convict on a lesser charge is another matter, of course.”

“It is their duty to convict if that is the law,” Kemp said. He was largely in favor of severe punishments, and had not liked the other’s lightness of tone. Belonging as Pike did to a trade that could only profit from this proliferation of capital offenses, such levity seemed like ingratitude. “It deters people from committing felonies,” he said. “It nurtures respect for our institutions, which I believe are the envy of the world.”

Pike had sensed this disapproval, understood it, felt a certain contempt for it. Not much humor there, not much play of mind. He himself had plenty of both—too much, some of his colleagues thought. “We need to make jokes about the law, sir,” he said. “It belongs to the profession. Like the doctors, you know. Who better fitted than they to make jokes about sickness?”

He paused on this with a certain sense of constraint, recalling only now that Kemp’s cousin, a man named Matthew Paris, had
been the doctor on the ship, had taken part in the mutiny, in fact had played a leading role in it, had been wounded when the people of the settlement were captured and had died of the wound. The embarrassment was needless, however; his remark had been so foreign to Kemp’s way of viewing the world that he had failed altogether to understand it, and so made no reply, obliging the lawyer to speak again, before the silence could become oppressive. He could not leave yet; there were things still to be imparted to this difficult client of his. “Well,” he said, “it deters those who are hanged, there is no smallest doubt of that. And of course it is an encouraging mark of our national prosperity.”