The Quality of Mercy: A Novel

  The house was of gray stone, broad-fronted and imposing, with wings that looked more recent than the main body of the building. A footman in livery appeared instantly, descended the steps between the parterres and with much deference took charge of Kemp’s horse and led it away. As he began to mount the steps, a youngish man, plainly dressed in a dark twill suit, came down to meet him and held out his hand. “Welcome to Wingfield, sir,” he said. “My name is Bourne, Roland Bourne. I am a half cousin of Lord Spenton and I act here as his steward. His lordship asks me to apologize for his failure to be here in person to greet you on your arrival. There is a meet of the hunt today, and it is expected of him to be present at it.”

  “I quite understand,” Kemp said, relieved at having time to gather himself before being required to encounter Spenton again and find the right face to put upon his host’s blend—remembered from their meeting at Vauxhall—of studied nonchalance and sudden fits of enthusiasm for what had seemed entirely marginal matters, tricks of water, clockwork toys, this handball match that was soon to take place. “Great possessions bring duties,” he said, summoning a smile. “That is a general rule.” This fellow seemed pleasant enough—probably a younger son and more or less penniless; otherwise he would hardly be at Spenton’s beck and call.

  “Indeed it is, sir, indeed it is. Lady Spenton is still enjoying her afternoon repose, and so it falls to me to show you to your apartment. It was thought that you might like to take your ease for a while, after the journey.”

  The room was on the first floor, reached from the main hall by a broad flight of steps that ascended directly, with no hint of the curve now thought fashionable, attesting to the age of the house, at least in this main part of it—well over a century, Kemp thought, noting as he mounted the stairs the heavy Jacobean oak rails of the banister. The Spenton family was not newly arrived at wealth and large estates, so much was obvious.

  It was clear to him, however, that money had been spent on the house, and perhaps fairly recently. His room was more spacious than it would once have been; walls had been demolished to make space for the canopied bed, the broad writing desk, the marble bust of an unknown worthy, the easy chairs, the smooth extent of Turkey carpet.

  There was a lingering warmth of sunshine here, and he noted the two large windows that had replaced the narrow casements of a former age. He approached these now and looked out over extensive views of the grounds. The long approach to the house, with the tree-lined drive rising gradually, had brought him to an eminence he had not fully realized until now. He could see the whole shape of the lake from here, a perfect oval, its shores clustered with willows, a small boat with a Chinese-style pagoda moored to the landing stage. Beyond this was what looked like a ruined abbey, with Gothic towers and ivied columns.

  By approaching the edge of one window and widening as much as possible his angle of vision, he was able to look eastward and see, at the furthest limit of sight, a pale suffusion in the sky that he thought must indicate the line of the coast. Before this, rising toward it, there was a thickening of the light, a low mist, pale sulfurous in color, and he guessed this to mark the distant presence of the mine. He noticed a narrow seam of green, two or three miles in length, running directly toward the sea. Some wooded cleft in the land …

  He was left to his thoughts and plans for an hour or so, and he was beginning to grow sleepy, as he half reclined in the high-backed chair with its deep cushions and footstool, when an elderly retainer came tapping at his door to tell him that Lord and Lady Spenton were below and looking forward to the pleasure of his company for tea in the drawing room.

  He was struck by the difference they showed in the style of their greetings. Lady Spenton bade him welcome with none of her husband’s languidness of manner. She was a tall woman, angular in figure and brisk of speech. She had made little effort to dress for the occasion; her hair was combed loose to her shoulders, without ornament, and she wore a day gown with a long apron of the sort she would wear when going about her usual duties. Spenton himself had come in straight from the hunt, still in riding habit and top boots.

  There had been a fall during the chase. A neighboring farmer had been thrown and had suffered a twisted wrist and two cracked ribs. “It is all in the way you take the fence,” Spenton said. “The horse must be sure of its rider, or it will balk. Personally, I think the beast was taking revenge. Davis is a heavy-handed fellow, I have seen myself how he wrenches his mount. A horse has a memory, sir, and sooner or later it will square accounts.” He paused here to take some tea, then turned to his wife. “And how has your day been, my dear?”

  This would be the first moment of the day they had set eyes on each other, Kemp thought, as Lady Spenton began speaking of some wrangle with a tenant over delayed rents. And it would probably be more or less the same every day while Spenton was up here, a situation which he suspected might well accord with the wishes of both. She would see to the running of the house, the management of the servants, the day-to-day dealings with the local tenant farmers. Helped in all this, and perhaps in more than this, by the pleasant-mannered steward …

  Kemp delayed any talk about his own plans until that evening at supper, which he and Spenton took alone, the lady of the house having sent her excuses and retired early. He had no very definite intentions for next day; he wanted to see the way things were run, the way the mine was managed, before starting to make plans for cutting labor costs and increasing production, though sure there would be scope for this. He knew—though he did not speak of it—that the mine was not making profits commensurate with capacity. With 130 men and boys at work in the colliery, and in spite of its favorable position near the sea and its extensive deposits, Spenton’s income from the mine was considerably short of two thousand pounds a year. He would make a good deal more from his land rents, so much was certain; but Kemp had studied the figures, and he knew that the balance was shifting from year to year in favor of the wealth that lay below, with the growing importance of coal for the steel industry and the decreasing costs of transport as the roads improved.

  He asked one or two questions regarding matters not yet clear to him, depending as they did on local practice: the levels of advance payment at the time of hiring, the extent to which the miners absented themselves from the work when they felt they had money enough to last the week. But for information on these counts he was referred to the steward and the head overman, Spenton professing himself to be entirely ignorant of them. Only once in the course of the meal did his host show any degree of interest in the conversation, and that was when he spoke of the impending handball match. They had a new champion this year, a young man named Michael Bordon, who worked as a putter in the mine.

  “Backbreaking work, you know,” Spenton said. “He won’t go on much longer with the handball—he will be past it before he reaches thirty. But for the present he is very gifted at it, he has the eye and the speed, quite out of the common. I talk to my tenants when I come up here, it is expected of me, I have always done it. But I make a point of coming up at this time of year so as to see the handball match—I never miss that if I can help it. It is an annual event, you know, with the neighboring colliery of Northfield, which is owned by the Pemberton family. It has been going on for many years now, it was started in my father’s time. Pemberton and I have a few guineas on the result. We were defeated last year by their man, who I am told will be their champion again this year, a formidable player, a man named Dickson. You are lucky in the timing of your visit, Kemp, the match is on this coming Sunday.”

  Kemp expressed a pleasure at this prospect that he did not feel. He thought it extraordinary that Spenton should be entirely ignorant of hiring levels at the mine and yet fully conversant with the names of the handball players. It was possible, of course, that the vagueness was mere affectation and that he knew a great deal more about the workings of the mine than he allowed to appear. Acquainted as he was with his host’s spending habits, Kemp suspected that the few guineas would
in fact be a few hundred. He was not a gambling man himself. His superstition, passionate as it was, lay all in the search for certainty, for assurances and portents, signs that would guarantee a success total and unqualified, impervious to the quirks of accident. That the signs themselves might be no more than accidental was not a suspicion he permitted himself, except in rare moments of discouragement.

  That night the moon shone through his window, a summer moon, full and reddish, like a nighttime sun. He did not close the shutters against this luminous intrusion, which made the objects in the room—the posts of the bed, the marble bust, the outlines of the chairs—into shapes of enchantment. As he lay awake and watched the slow shifting of the shadows, the strangeness, the unearthly light seemed like a promise to him, a good augury for the change in his life that he was planning.

  A lot would depend on the next few days, what he saw, what he was shown. Spenton obviously took little interest in the day-to-day management of the mine; his steward, Roland Bourne, would know more, and there would be deputies responsible for hiring labor, for upkeep, for the rendering of accounts. But Bourne was there because of family connection, not because of any proved capacity. It seemed to Kemp, as he lay there in the moonlight, a distinctly haphazard way of doing things. He would introduce more method, a closer control. There were many abuses in the industry. He had read of the frauds of the coal dealers, the malpractices in the relations between the coal owners and the lighter-men who carried the coal from the wharves at the mouth of the Wear out to the collier ships that would bear it south to Hull and London.

  Vigilance would be needed, but the times were auspicious. Blast furnaces fed by coke were growing in size and number, an expansion greatly helped by the wars with France, which had increased the demand for all manner of weaponry. They still had to use charcoal for converting the pig iron into bar iron, but it could not be long now before coke alone was used for the whole process, bringing about a huge increase in the demand for coal.

  As he lay there in an excited reverie of possibilities and prospects, Jane Ashton’s image was never far from his mind. She was a luminous presence there in the room. He thought of how he would explain his plans to her; he saw her face in the moonlight, bright-eyed with interest as she listened to him. He remembered her face as he had seen it, glimpsed so briefly in the Spring Gardens at Vauxhall just at the moment when he had come to an agreement with Spenton, made radiantly beautiful by the descending shower of gold. One day he would tell her of this quintessential moment, but not yet. He had a sudden strong erotic feeling for her, the white neck with its pearls, the gemstones in her hair, the straight shoulders and slender waist, the close-fitting bodice of her dress. He pictured her undressing in the moonlight of this room while he lay waiting for her. She would feel a maidenly demur at undressing completely; she would retain an undergarment of some diaphanous material, thin enough for her to feel his touch on her body as she lay beside him, touch of a man’s hands, never felt before … All was propitious for invention and expansion, every factor, every indication. The fall in the rate of interest, coinciding as it did with a growth in the markets at home and abroad, had provided strong incentives. The return of peace in 1763 had eased the pressure on the price of Consols and brought with it a rate of public borrowing which was unlikely to exceed three percent … The quickened breath of her excitement as she turned toward him, as he rose above her …

  Limitless possibilities of pleasure and profit filled his mind as the moon rose across his windows and the light of it ebbed slowly from the room. He did not sleep until long after midnight, but the morning found him fresh, and eager to begin his explorations. He would have liked to set forth at once, immediately after his hot chocolate and buttered toast, but Spenton had an hour to spare before meeting some of his tenants and he was anxious to show his visitor some of the features of the grounds.

  The lake came first. A huge basin had been scooped out and water fed into it by diverting a tributary of the Wear that ran behind the house. Clumps of trees had been artfully disposed to break the view and give an air of naturalness to this blank sheet.

  “No vista is complete without water,” Spenton said. “I have also constructed a grotto with cascades, which I shall show you shortly. It was designed by Repton, you know. I first had the idea while on a visit to Chiswick Park, which was laid out for Lord Burlington in the romantic style by William Kent. Kent was virtually unknown at that time, but he became famous afterward, he laid out the grounds for a good many houses, generally contriving a lake and waterfalls and a folly or two, and planting trees to give a natural look. Repton learned much from him. It was Repton who built the medieval ruin for me. I had to extend the park on that side by taking over some of the common ground.”

  Guided by his host, Kemp was able to see, across the motionless expanse of water, beyond the boat with the Chinese pagoda, through a fringe of weeping willows, the broken towers and arches that he had glimpsed the afternoon before from the window of his room.

  “You will scarce believe it,” Spenton said, “but in my father’s time these grounds were still laid out with formal walks and straight avenues, in the old, outmoded style, you know. I took care to have copses planted out with oak and beech and ash. These are trees with a quality of the picturesque, of course, but that is not the only reason. When the time comes for thinning, they are the most profitable timber to sell.”

  Only a politeness deriving from self-interest held Kemp back from some expression of sarcasm at these words. His host had spent enormous sums on these improvements; he had appropriated common ground, perhaps destroying woodland in the process, at a loss to the local people. And all this not for any sound commercial reason but simply to extend the view, make space for a totally unnecessary ruin. And now here he was, congratulating himself on the small profits he would make from the sale of timber!

  The grotto had a pool and a waterfall divided into three streams that descended over the face of a shallow cave. The central stream fell onto the boards of a water wheel and kept it turning, and this, by the aid of some instrument that Kemp did not see, caused a water nymph, fashioned in polished tin, with a painted smile and painted nipples, to stand clear of the water for some moments, sink to her midriff, rise again, dripping and smiling.

  “My own invention entirely,” Spenton said. “It was inspired by the water show at the Spring Gardens, which you will recall we visited together. I am planning to introduce another wheel, which will revolve in the opposite direction and bring forth a triton or perhaps a seahorse.”

  As they returned, Spenton led Kemp up a short rise, which brought them to the highest point in the grounds. There was a gazebo on the crest, with steps that led up to an open lantern. From here the views were extensive, and Kemp remarked on the yellowish mist of smoke that thickened the air at a distance below them. “I suppose that marks the colliery,” he said.

  “Indeed, sir, yes. It does something to spoil the vista, but up here it does not much trouble us. We may see it, but it does not accede to the nostrils. Bad odors keep close to the ground, they lurk, sir.”

  From here there was a clear view across to the sea, more now than a difference in the quality of light, as it had seemed earlier from Kemp’s window, but a definite territory of water, slate blue in the morning light. He could see gulls wheeling above, not the forms of the birds but the flashes that came from them as they turned in flight. However, what mainly took his attention was the long seam of green that lay toward the sea, in fact appeared to join it. It was the same wooded cleft that he had seen from his room, but from this point of vantage he had a stronger sense of the strangeness of it, this deep scrape in a landscape of pasture fields and sparse trees. Impossible from here to determine how deep it was, how deeply it had gouged out the land. But the cleft must be narrow and the sides steep, he thought; otherwise the depth of the cut would be easier to judge from a height so far above.

  “That valley down there,” he said. “Strange in such a setting.
It looks like a kind of ravine.” In fact it was like a wound, he thought, a wound stitched by the vegetation that had sprung up but still not healed.

  “A kind of ravine is what it is. The people here call it the Dene. There are a number of such narrow valleys here in East Durham, where rivers have cut trenches in the limestone. Scientific gentlemen from London have sometimes asked permission to visit this one—botanists, naturalists, people of that kind.”

  “Why is that?”

  “It has its own climate, quite different from the land surrounding it. The sides are very steep and they are thickly wooded, so they can sometimes protect the valley floor from winds, sometimes expose it to the blast by acting like a tunnel. This makes for extremes of light and temperature, or so I am told. There are parts of the Dene that keep warm even in winter. It seems that butterflies extremely rare elsewhere in Britain are commonly seen here. A gentleman from the Royal Society once told me that he had identified more than a hundred different kinds of moss and liverwort bordering the stream that runs through. I allow the mining folk to go there, provided they set no traps or snares. My gamekeeper keeps an eye on things. The people know I would close it off if there were any trouble of that kind. Meanwhile, you know, it is a resource for them. The children play there until the time comes for them to start work in the mine. There are mushrooms and berries to be gathered. Courting couples find refuge there, among the trees.” He paused, smiling. “I believe that agreeing to venture in there is an important step on the road to matrimony,” he said.

  There was a sort of easy paternalism in this that grated on Kemp and aroused a degree of hostility in him, not because he felt any great sympathy for the mining folk, but because it brought his own early struggles back to mind. He had had to scrabble for money, fight for his place in the world. Spenton could afford to take this indulgent tone, here in his gazebo, surveying the extent of his dominion—a dominion never challenged or brought into question except by his own extravagance and excess.