The Quality of Mercy (9 page)

Van Dillen’s pale, heavy face registered nothing of these thoughts as he got to his feet. “I will take my leave, sir,” he said. “I have made the offer that was agreed among us. I am sorry you do not see fit—” He faltered a moment, meeting Kemp’s gaze, then said more firmly, “I think you are making a mistake, but the arbitration of law will settle the business one way or the other.”

Kemp assented to this indifferently and accompanied his visitor to the head of the stairs that led down to the street. Returning to his office, he walked to and fro for a while, possessed by a spirit of discontent. Glancing through the thick and rippled glass of his window, he had a distorted view of rooftops and chimneys. He saw pigeons rise, their wingbeats like a stirring in some opaque and viscous fluid. The window was fixed to the wall and could not be opened. The bank’s premises were old; they had been old
in his father-in-law’s time. Jarrold had always been parsimonious; he had limited the windows in this room to one only, and had it fixed in place, in order to avoid the window taxes of the 1720s.

Kemp had not found it necessary to make any changes. London’s skies were fogged by smoke from a thousand chimneys. Lamps would have been needed to work by, in any case, for most of the year. He did not mind spending money where he saw it as necessary, but this was a place of business; he could see no point in trying to make it look like something else. He knew people who were spending considerable sums to make their offices resemble drawing rooms, with sash windows and chintz upholstery and cabinets of porcelain. Such extravagance was enough to ruin a man’s reputation for sober and reliable dealing.

Now, however, he would have liked to have a window he could throw open, to admit more air into the closeness of his office, expel the lingering traces of Van Dillen’s scent and sweat. As he paused in his pacing and stood still in the middle of the room, it seemed to him that this was also the smell of the world outside, that it came seeping through, thickened by stagnant sewage and fecal dust. He was a fastidious man, clean and scrupulous in his person and clothing, outward mark of his need to be beyond reproach in motive and behavior. He had never faltered in the attention he paid to his person, but in the pursuit of money to pay his father’s debts he had sometimes come short on the moral plane, had been obliged to breath a tainted air. He had suffered from this at the time, and continued to do so at the memory.

It was a similar sense of taint, a feeling of being contaminated, that troubled him now. He had been too eager with his explanations to this Dutch interloper, he had lowered himself. As if it mattered a straw whether the fellow appreciated his motives or not.

We generally like to regard ourselves in a good light, but the extent to which this matters varies from person to person. For Erasmus Kemp it mattered very much, and for this reason he had never been much given to any closeness of self-questioning. The
answers to such questions will be ambiguous at best; motives will usually reveal themselves to be impure. Kemp had generally found it sufficient to assure himself of needing no one’s endorsement, whether friend or foe, not merely on particular occasions but generally. It was a question of dignity. And now here he was, disgusted with himself at the recollection of his vehemence before that foreigner, whom he had not liked, whose interests were opposed to his own.

A betrayal of himself, no less—and not the first since his return. Lately he had been increasingly subject to impulses to explain himself, justify himself, even with people he did not know well, a thing quite foreign to his usual self-containment, and to what he thought of as his true character. It was as though he were striving to shore up certainties previously held that seemed now in danger of slipping away. In an obscure fashion he was beginning to sense why this might be so. The principle of justice, always strong in him, had been violated by his own failure, since returning home, to find any feeling of happiness or cause for celebration at the success of his expedition to Florida. For great success it had been, there could be no doubt of that. He had hunted down the fugitives, white and black. He had used troops from the garrison at St. Augustine to flush them out. The remnants of the crew lay in prison now, awaiting trial.

A triumph, no other word for it. Why, then, this haunting sense of loss and waste? But it was not new, it had always been there, a companion continually neglected and forgotten, continually demanding to be recognized anew. All the successes of his life were consumed to ash in the fire of achieving, in the realization of his will and intention. Only the energy of planning, the envisaging of success gave him pleasure, only purposes had meaning for him. He had always lived by plans, by vows, by promises made to himself.

He brought to memory now, as if to make his success more real to him, the last hours of that colony of renegades, the approach through darkness, his tension of excitement kept under
stern check, the stationing of the troops, the waiting for dawn. From the compound below there had come the sound of drum and fiddle and some kind of whistle or flute, a discordant music, sometimes passing into wild harmony. From the swamps all around the whine of mosquitos and the strange sharp clicking of young alligators as they snapped at frogs and turtles in the creeks. Those sounds, that night, the anticipation of capturing Paris and his motley associates and bringing them to justice—that had been happiness.

And now this sordid aftermath, this haggler of a broker coming with his “generous offer.” Kemp was shrewd in matters concerning money, with a shrewdness derived from years of business dealings. He knew he could have increased Van Dillen’s offer if he had been prepared to bargain. They would not want to risk an adverse judgment; none of the brotherhood at Lloyds would want a precedent established; increased indemnities on hazards to cargo could too easily be turned to the shipowners’ advantage. But this was a problem that did not concern him.

The triumph of the capture had not survived his hated cousin’s death. Nor had the hatred survived. This cousin, who had mortally offended him in childhood, who had been cast into Norwich Jail as a common prisoner and set in the pillory for printing seditious matter and denying Holy Writ, bringing disgrace on the whole family, who had led the crew of the
Liverpool Merchant
in mutiny and murder and made off with ship and cargo. A burden of accumulated bitterness lifted from his spirit by this death, but bringing neither freedom nor relief, only a sort of vacancy.

He had known it as he stood on the quarterdeck of the ship that was to bring them home, below that vast, all-encompassing sky, looking down at the men and women of the settlement and the children of their union. He had felt repugnance at the thought of white and black breeding together. Still in his hand the button Matthew had let fall as he died, a gift to the cousin who had hated him, who had brought the soldiers and ordered the shooting, a gift to the author of his death …

A thought of an unaccustomed kind came to him as he moved to reseat himself at his desk and resume the work that awaited him there. He had argued once, while still in Liverpool, with the girl he had wanted to marry, about a painting in her parents’ house, whether it was a painting of people in Paradise or just in a beautiful garden. Sarah and he had almost quarreled over it.

The people in the painting were happy and smiling and elegantly dressed, at ease in their surroundings. Somewhere there might be a place like this, a place where dwelt those who were caught and held in the anticipation of triumph, dwelling forever in some night of excited vigil, with the wild music sounding in their ears. Or even one for those who had realized their aims and were happy still. Somewhere there might be a piece of ground, a territory, where the following steps are also happy, the steps you take after the victory, after justice has been done and profits made, when you begin to walk away, when you return home …

Perhaps the coal fields of Durham might be such a place for him. The papers on the desk before him were mainly concerned with the mining industry. Since learning of Spenton’s desire for a loan he had spent a good deal of time studying production figures and methods of extraction in the eastern part of the county, toward the sea. He had talked to shipping agents, studied contracts made by the mine owners or their lessees with the lighter-men who loaded the coal at the wharfs of Hartlepool and carried it to the collier ships that would bring it down to the Pool of London. He had learned to his great satisfaction that the lease on Spenton’s mines was due to expire in a matter of weeks. He had worked out the terms of an offer that might be attractive to Spenton, linking the loan with revised conditions for the lease.

Spenton had not made any move to visit the bank, and Kemp, wanting to avoid all appearance of eagerness or haste, had waited for an invitation to the nobleman’s London house. Instead of this, Spenton had sent him a note by a servant, inviting him to be a guest at a party for dinner that he was giving at the Spring Gardens in Vauxhall in some days’ time. Kemp had learned later
that Sykes too had been invited. It wasn’t exactly what he had wanted; there would be too many people. But he would be able to broach the matter, at least.

Jane Ashton’s face came to his mind again. It had all be gun there, this prospect for the future, this renewal of purpose and hope, it had all begun with her smile and her glance. Since that moment all had gone well, all was set fair. She had brought him luck. The present lease expired at just the right time for him, and there were no special bidding rights involved in its renewal.

She must have already known about the court cases that were pending. She must have understood that her brother’s interests were directly opposed to his, that the man she was looking at stood for everything her brother—and she too, no doubt—considered detestable. Yet there had been no hint of enmity in her regard, and he had been aware of none on his own part as he looked at her. And this was something so far outside his usual habit of mind as to seem almost miraculous.

“It is a most amazing piece of good fortune,” Ashton said. “No, that is not the way to describe it, it is the work of Divine Providence.”

Horace Stanton, who was a friend and fellow abolitionist of long standing and would be a leading member of the defense when the charges of murder and piracy came before a jury, nodded at these words, but without much appearance of fervor. He was, like Ashton, a devout Methodist, but the name of God did not come often to his lips. Cautious by nature, he was sparing in expressions of faith, not wishing to squander resources. Only in the courtroom, making his final plea to the jury, was this habitual caution relaxed.

“Certainly it will help our case very considerably,” he said. “It is likely to help the underwriters too, if they make the right use of it. It is not yet known who will be representing them when the case comes up.”

The two men were sitting over coffee in the morning room of Ashton’s house. It was still early; Stanton had come with the news as soon as possible, knowing how much it would gladden his friend.

“I cannot ascribe such a thing to the working of chance alone,” Ashton said. “There is a blessing in it.”

Jane Ashton entered the room as he was speaking, and bade the two good morning. “What blessing is that?” she said.

“We have a new witness,” Ashton said.

Stanton’s manner had brightened perceptibly at the sight of Jane in her cream-colored day gown, which followed the lines of her figure very much more closely than the hoop skirts fashionably worn for going out. He was unmarried and well settled; he had known Jane Ashton since she was sixteen and had always thought her highly attractive, and not only because of her looks: something careless-seeming in her, irreverent almost, made a challenge to his prudent and sober nature. She was too headstrong, of course, too forward with her opinions—the result of growing up without parental control. But marriage would cure her of these faults.

“He is one who was there at the time the negroes were thrown overboard,” he said. “One who was neither slave nor crew member.”

“That sounds very mysterious.” Jane smiled at the lawyer, aware of his interest and pleased by it, though privately thinking him somewhat too dry and tending too much to the pompous.

“The interpreter on the ship,” Ashton said and paused, smiling. His face had lost its lines of strain; he looked years younger. “What they call the linguister, whose work it is to make clear to his fellow Africans the wishes and commands of officers and crew. You understand, there were different languages spoken among them, depending on the region where they were captured.”

“He saw the jettisoning,” Stanton said. “He saw the crew rise against the captain. He saw everything that took place.”

“He is an African, then? I thought they were all sold back into slavery in Carolina.”

“That might have been his fate, certainly,” Ashton said. “He was not a slave, he was on the ship of his own free will. He was intending to come to England to better his fortunes. None of this mattered to Kemp, of course. The man was offered for sale at
Charles Town along with the others. By his own and our good fortune, an army officer just retired and waiting for a ship home, a Colonel Trembath, liked the look of him, discovered he could speak passable English, purchased him and brought him back to England as his personal servant. When he heard the man’s story, he gave him his freedom and kept him in his service at a wage.”

Ashton paused a moment, and there was a note of wonder when he spoke again. “He brought him here, to London. He has been here ever since, as a servant in Trembath’s house, under the name of James Porter. The interest the case has roused, the frequent mentions of it in the press, brought it to his employer’s notice. He has notified us that Porter is ready to testify to the effect that there was no shortage of water at the time, that in fact there had been recent rain when these people were cast overboard. He declares that the decks were not yet dry from it on the morning when the deed was done.”