The Quality of Mercy (36 page)

“What is it, a wayleave? Tha means a charge for the passin’ of the coal?”

“When it is over private ground, yes. And when it is a question of saving costs for the owner of the mine or the lessees, the charge can be high. I have a client, I do not mention his name,
who receives two thousand five hundred pounds a year, without lifting a finger, for a wayleave over Wickley Moor, a pittance of ground scarcely above two hundred yards in extent. Say nothing of this to anyone, if you know what is in your interest. Of course, I may be wrong—time will tell. But if there is benefit, I would rather see it go to a local man than some interloper from London who puts on airs and thinks he is superior.”

Michael uttered his thanks for the information, which he saw was well meant, and promised to keep it in mind. But nothing in the notary’s words, whose significance in any case he had not yet fully grasped, caused the slightest wavering in his determination to make a gift of the land to his father. When, some time later, he issued from Wingfield with the deed in his hands, this determination was as strong as ever.

His father had left for work that day at the usual hour. These summer mornings the world was alive with birdsong; there were clumps of meadowsweet in the fields, growing tall where the hedges gave protection.

It was in this season that Bordon experienced the bitterness of servitude most keenly. The promise of the day, the sense of strengthening light, the openness of the countryside around him—everything he saw and felt brought home to him the knowledge of his subjection, the knowledge that he would soon be thrust down into darkness. He minded less in the winter, going from the dark to the dark. But at this time of the year the light was clear as he reached the mine, as he bound his limbs in the loops of rope and took a grip on David and heard the banksman shout that all was clear for the descent. It was the world of light he was leaving; it would be a different light he was drawn up to at the end of his stint, a light that had spent its promise, as he had spent his strength in the hours of hacking out the coal in the cramped space of the seam, with no light but the candle flame for guide.

At the time that his eldest son was listening to the scratch of
the notary’s pen, about halfway through the shift—though he did not go by any measurement of time, only by the amount of coal he had hewed out—he was on his knees, striking with a short-handled pick at the glinting face of the coal. The putter and his mate were working at his back; they were at a distance from him, dragging the loaded corves along the gallery toward the pit bottom.

He was striking with short, rapid strokes to free the coal from its bedding of slate. The cracking sounds of impact prevented him from hearing the first signals of strain from the timbers overhead, strangely like a man bringing up phlegm from his throat, preparatory to spitting. Had he heard them he would have known what they meant; he would have downed tools and crawled away from the face and might perhaps have saved himself. By the time he heard the roar of collapse, it was too late. The pillar of coal that had been left to support the roof buckled sideways toward him, the heavy timbers and the mass of stone they had held back fell down on him and crushed his back and legs and covered his body.

He was facedown, powerless to make the smallest movement. He felt no pain at first, only a paralyzing constriction of the chest and a sense of terrible harm done to him. The weight of the rock pinned his body down and kept his face pressed close to the ground, but some chance shift in the fall had spared his head and left a space below his mouth and chin, and so granted him the cruel respite of some minutes more of consciousness and growing pain. Into this bowl his blood dripped heavily. He could hear the splash of it. He could see the shine of the beck. Someone was throwing pebbles into the water, trying to prevent his boat from winning.

“There is much to be done,” Erasmus Kemp said, “but I knew before I set out that that would be the case.”

He was where he had so much looked forward to being, in the drawing room of Ashton’s house, talking to Jane Ashton, telling her about his plans for the mine. Ashton himself was not present, a happy circumstance. “Time is being wasted there through faulty planning,” he said. “And money with it—the two things go together.”

He was swept by the wish to lay everything at her feet, all that he had seen and learned during his visit, all his intentions for improvement and profit. She was intensely present as she sat there before him, her eyes, her voice, the form of her body in the loose gown. As always now, whether he was with her or not, thoughts of his mining enterprise and the desire to have her in his arms were inextricably mingled—it was like embracing the future. And she saw the desire for her expressed in his eyes and in the postures of his body and felt a response to it, an excited wish to be joined with him in giving and receiving. He was so fine, with his certainty, his passionate directness of speech, his fiery looks, his mouth so firm and determined. His plans for the mine were homage to her; she knew herself to be necessary to him, powerful in granting and withholding.

He told her about his plans to make more shafts and sink them deeper. A thousand feet you could go down if you got the right people to do the boring. It was easier—and cheaper—to sink shafts than to construct long galleries from the pit bottom, galleries that got longer as more coal was conveyed away from the face. Besides, you saved money on labor, because the carriage of the coal took more time if the galleries were long. The putters were paid by the amount of coal they shifted, but this was not an efficient way of doing things, as they varied in their capacities and much time was lost in dragging the corves along the galleries. He thought it better to pay a fixed daily wage for shifting the hewer’s stint, this wage to be reduced if they fell short of their task or left without completing it.

“But won’t that mean they will lose money, these putters?” Jane said.

“No, no, nothing of the sort,” Erasmus said, smiling. “No, it means that more coal will be produced at less cost. The putters will still get their wage.”

Jane felt some shadow of uncertainty at this, as it seemed to her that there was a degree of confusion in his words between the amount of coal produced and the welfare of the working people, which was to put things in the wrong order. But he was so eager and so sure, his face was so full of ardor, such doubts seemed grudging and cold. And of course there was so much about it all that she did not yet understand …

“I suppose it will make their work less hard,” she said. “I mean, if the galleries are shorter, they won’t have so far to drag those heavy sledges with the loaded baskets on them.”

“Exactly.” Erasmus looked at her with a brilliant air of approval for her sagacity. “You have put your finger on it,” he said. “Beautiful fingers you have got, and beautiful hands—all of you is beautiful.”

These last words had come out in a rush, totally unpremeditated. Her judgment and her person were closely, intimately blended in his mind; he was increasingly given to plunges of
impulse in his talking with her. He saw the color rise in her face, though she did not look away. He had gone too far, he had embarrassed her, insinuating a knowledge of her beauties that still lay beyond his experience. There was need to retreat.

“I have discovered,” he said, “that in some collieries, but not at present in Durham, they lay metal tracks along the carriageways so that the loaded sledges may pass more easily along. I am intending to introduce this system at Thorpe. It would have great advantages. Metal tracks of that kind would lighten the task of the putters, enabling them to start the work at a younger age, with a great saving in wages.”

Jane’s confusion at the compliment, abating now but still present, prevented her from giving these last words the attention she might otherwise have paid them. Later she was to remember them and puzzle over how the task of the putters would thereby be lightened. “At what age do they begin this labor?” she asked.

“At seven, or such is the practice in Durham.”

“What, they would start dragging those baskets along the tracks at the age of seven?”

“No, no, at first their work is with the trapdoors, opening and closing the doors to keep the workings of the mine properly ventilated. No, they will not have the strength for the corves until they get to nine or ten.”

He paused now for some pleasurable moments; he had been keeping the best of the news for the end. “Spenton will be back in London the day after tomorrow,” he said. “I am intending to visit him at his house. There is a proposition I wish to make to him, something that came to me during my visit up there.” He waited for the simple question from her that would authorize him to confide his plans, bestow a blessing on them.

“What is that, is it something new?”

He told her then about his idea of building a road through the Dene, a road straight through to the sea, only three miles—four if you counted the distance from the pithead. The sides of the ravine were steep and wooded, he told her, but below, where the stream
ran, the ground was level, there was space enough. Straight through to the sea without impediment. The land where the Dene opened out was marshy, but the roadway could be raised. He would have a harbor built. “At present,” he said, “a good deal of the coal is sold locally, there at the pit, to save the cost of transport. The road once made, we can abandon that practice, we can have all of it shipped south to the foundries, where the prices are much higher.”

“So the road would pass over where the stream is now?”

“Yes, the water will have to be dammed up somehow, or diverted, otherwise it would wear away the foundations of the road. We will have to fell some of the trees so as to give space for the wagons.”

Erasmus paused for a moment, aware of the face before him, the look of serious inquiry on it, so sweet to him. Love gathered in his throat. “If only you could come and see for yourself,” he said. “If only we could go together. I want you to see it as I see it, and understand what it will mean to the work of the colliery.”

“How could I?” She smiled at his eagerness. “We could not travel together or stay together when we arrived there. I suppose you do not see us as fellow guests of Lord Spenton.”

With a sudden movement Erasmus set down the teacup he had been holding. “Say you will marry me,” he said. He would have knelt before her, but the table lay between them. Instead he rose to his feet and stood glowering down at her. “Say you will marry me,” he said again. “If you will marry me, you will make me live again. Everything I have and everything I am I lay at your feet. I will give up the bank’s holdings in the West Indies, if it will please you and your brother. Anything you ask of me I will do, only say you will marry me, say you will be my wife.”

Her smile had faded with his words. In the surprise of it—not the question itself, she had entertained the possibility of his proposing to her, but the haste and violence of the pleading in it—she felt the color leave her face. She had never thought to be wanted in such a way. Even some pity for him came to her, for the terrible
nakedness of his declaration and his promises; some apprehension too, as if, on his feet as he was and with looks so burning, he might move to her, take hold of her, before she could find resolution or words to stay him.

“I cannot decide so quickly,” she said. “You must give me time, Erasmus. You must give me some days. There is my brother …”

“I will speak to him. I will undertake to sever all my connections with the Africa trade. I will declare my support for the abolition of slavery. I will announce it in a form that he and I can agree on together, a form he can use for his purposes, for his cause … When can I have your answer?”

“I must think … You must give me some days.”

“May I hope, at least?”

The look she gave him was an answer sufficiently eloquent, and it was this look, and this hope, that he carried away with him.

Ashton returned home early in the evening after a long consultation with his new lawyer, Harvey, the young barrister recommended by Stanton, a convinced abolitionist who had offered his services free in the Evans case. It was Ashton’s view now that Horace Stanton’s withdrawal from the case—felt at the time as failure of nerve and betrayal on his friend’s part—had been on the whole a good thing. This new man was still on the right side of thirty, full of fire and energy, just what was needed. He had entirely supported the decision to prosecute Bolton and Lyons on the original charges of criminal assault and abduction carried out in the attempt to return Evans by force to Jamaica. And he shared Ashton’s hope that such an action, never brought before on behalf of a former slave, might result in a judgment that set an absolute prohibition on all private attempts in future to transport anyone without consent out of the kingdom, which Harvey hoped to show was tantamount to saying that no person, having once set foot in England, could any longer be regarded as the property of another. The date for the hearing had finally been set, and Ashton was intending to inform his sister of this, but she was before him with the news of Kemp’s proposal, eager to confront, as soon as she could, what she felt likely to be an unfavorable reception.

Her brother’s looks confirmed this suspicion now. He was
silent for some moments, then said, “Well, it has hardly been a protracted courtship. I had no idea that things had reached so far between you.”

It was as if he were accusing her of a haste that was unbecoming. “He spoke on the spur of the moment,” she said. “He will be leaving for Durham again before very long. He wanted to have some hope of a favorable reply while he is still here in London.” Did Frederick really think she would keep him informed from day to day of the attraction that had grown, the looks, the tones? She was not herself conscious of any precipitation in the relations between them. It had all begun the evening of her visit to her friend Anne Sykes, a good while before Frederick had so much as set eyes on Erasmus.

“You did not give him an answer, then?”