The Quality of Mercy: A Novel

  He could find no comfort or reassurance in any of these things, even as their familiarity returned. They expressed him, they consorted with his state, that was all. It was the same with his mansion in St. James’s Square: silk hangings and ormolu clocks and Italian stucco and mahogany paneling—costly furnishings, as befitted his wealth, but no more to him than that.

  He found himself thinking now of his parents’ house in Liverpool and of his bedroom there, the things in it that had been dear to him, abetting him in his hopes, consoling him in his disappointments: the silver cockspurs and the brace of dueling pistols on the wall, this the gift of his father; the framed embroidery done by his mother, Blessed Are the Meek, the words picked out in dark blue stitches surrounded by forget-me-nots and white roses. Like many persons of fanatical character, Kemp was deeply superstitious, though he would have been highly indignant to hear the word applied to him. The objects in that room, so clearly remembered, had solemnized his love for Sarah Walpert and his intention to marry her; they had sorrowed with him at her loss; they had witnessed his vows to go into sugar and repay his father’s debts.

  The rage was spent in him now, to leave a feeling almost of desolation. It had only been the news of Sullivan’s escape that had quickened him to fury. Sullivan, who had been so devoted to Matthew, had attended him when he lay dying. The fellow had had the presumption, in chains with the others as he was, to ask for the return of his fiddle on the grounds that it was personal property. Kemp had remembered this insolence and the look of the man as he made the request, the long, dark hair unkempt, tied back with a ragged scrap of cotton, the blue eyes at once vague and quick-glancing, as if he had glimpsed something splendid the moment before and was trying to find it again. There had been tears in those eyes when Matthew was nearing his end, and Kemp had felt it as an insult, this grief for his cousin, who had led the crew in mutiny and murder and piracy, an insult to the high sense of justice that had taken him halfway across the world to bring these men to account for their crimes, his cousin chief among them, and so avenge the father who had hanged himself rather than face the shame of bankruptcy.

  His mind flinched away from thoughts of his father fumbling with the noose in the dark. There was no high mission of justice now; it had gone with his cousin’s death, gone while he stood on the deck, feeling the immensity of his defeat, clasping the brass button that Matthew had let fall as he spoke his dying words. Something about hope … There was no knowing how his cousin came to be clutching the button in these last moments of his life. Kemp remembered that his first impulse, on mounting again to the quarterdeck, had been to throw it overboard, into the sea. Then it had come to him that it was a kind of gift, though accidental, and he had put it away in his pocket. It had stayed in his pocket throughout the voyage home and he had kept it since, without really knowing why. Because of the mystery surrounding it, the button had become a sort of talisman. Over the course of time the sense of accident had been replaced in Kemp’s mind with an opposite feeling of design, as if he had been meant to have it all along. It lay now in a drawer of his desk; he took it out and looked at it sometimes, and remembered how his cousin had glared across the cabin before he died, and spoken loudly, as if answering some urgent question.

  Still he stood there, glancing indifferently at the objects in the room. He had done everything that was practical and needful. He had sold the negroes in Charles Town and used the money to buy a share in a cotton plantation some miles inland; he had seen his cousin buried in consecrated ground; he had brought the surviving members of the crew back to London to have their crimes and their punishment published widely. He had always been sure of being in the right, always sure that his reasons were impeccable and would stand up to any scrutiny. He was no less convinced of it now, as he stood there. But his conviction of moral rectitude and commercial shrewdness brought no slightest warmth or comfort to him.

  He had thought this sense of being trapped in shadows when he should be out in the sun might be due in some measure to his wife’s death. She had died while he was in Florida, of a distemper caused by poisoning of the blood, the doctors said. They had not been happy together, and in fact had lived largely separate lives during these last years. He had not loved his wife, though in the days of courtship he had professed love for her. She was Sir Hugo Jarrold’s daughter, she had wanted him, and her father was accustomed to give her what she wanted. He, for his part, had been driven by the need to repay the debts his own father had left. It had not been long before she discovered the betrayal, and she had gone on to betray him in her turn, many times over. In spite of this, he felt the more alone for her going. His mother too had died while he was away. The knowledge that he had not been there by her side at the moment of her death had clouded his homecoming with a guilt he knew to be unreasonable but which was no less real to him for that.

  He thought of Jane Ashton again, and with the thought came some lightening of his mood. Not five minutes after the words they had exchanged and her smile when she looked away, his host, Sir Richard Sykes, who sometimes acted as guarantor of the bank’s credit abroad, had drawn him aside to tell him that an acquaintance, Lord Spenton, was interested in applying to the bank for a loan.

  Sykes had told him something about Spenton’s situation, and he had investigated further. There were debts here and there, some of them fairly substantial. Spenton owned large tracts of land in the County of Durham. More importantly, from the bank’s point of view, he owned all the coal that lay below these acres. His mines were not so profitable as they should be, considering their advantageous position close to the coast. It had immediately seemed to Kemp an opportunity for investment of a kind long meditated and hoped for. He had told Sykes that the bank would be ready to discuss the loan, and he was waiting now for some further word from Spenton, who was taking his time over it. This waiting, the prospect of getting into the coal trade, was at present the only thing that gave any glow of promise to Kemp’s feelings about the future.

  Not five minutes after that smile of hers, he thought again. It was as if she had blessed the enterprise even before either of them knew of it.

  4

  Jane regarded her brother with the expression she reserved for his accounts of his doings: solicitous, affectionate, marked by a slight pretense of disbelief. She was the younger by twelve years—they were the only two that had survived childhood—and she admired his earnestness of purpose, though sometimes, when this became relentless, she grew impatient at it and in a way rebellious.

  “You look tired,” she said. “Would you like more tea?” He was not a robust man, and the calls he made on himself taxed him sometimes beyond his strength.

  Ashton held out his cup to be replenished. “I have been rushing to and fro like a madman all day.”

  “Did you manage to save the man?”

  The question concerned a negro from the Gold Coast who went by the name of Jeremy Evans. After residing quietly in Chelsea for three years gaining a living as a porter, he had been seen and recognized by his former owner, who had brought him from the sugar fields of Barbados and from whom he had run away once on British soil. On this man’s orders Evans had been kidnapped the previous evening, tied and gagged, carried to Gravesend and rowed out to a ship bound for Jamaica, to be sold as a slave on arrival.

  “It turned out that the captain was in the plot,” Ashton said. “I think it probable that he was promised a commission on the sale. As you know, we had obtained from the Rotation Office a warrant for Evans’s release and had it sent to Gravesend, where the ship was lying. But it came to me that with the ship cleared and ready to sail, the captain might refuse to obey the summons, or pretend he never received it, which in fact was what he did.” Ashton paused to sip some of his tea. “This is doing me a power of good,” he said, smiling at his sister.

  Jane kept house for him and made sure the servants performed their duties, just as she tried to make sure she performed her own. She was capable of considerable severity w
ith them, as with herself, at any scanting or neglect. It was a lesson learned from her mother—both parents were dead now. She knew how her brother liked his tea and took care to see it was made as it should be. He was ascetic in his tastes; it was rarely that he touched alcohol in any form.

  “I knew that the only thing he would take notice of was a writ of habeas corpus,” he said. “I had to go first to the Lord Mayor and then to Justice Winslow, and spend time waiting, before I could obtain the writ. Then it had to be served on the captain aboard his ship. We were lucky. Two hours more and she would have been setting sail.”

  “Mr. Evans was the lucky one,” she said. “He will have cause to remember you.” Others too, she thought. For a good number of years now Frederick had given all his energy, and spent much of his private fortune, in contesting the right of property in other human beings, particularly when attempts were made to assert this right in England. It had been revulsion at a brutal case of reenslavement that had brought him to embrace this cause, and so changed his life. Stronger than revulsion had been shame and a sort of remorse that such things could happen on English soil, that they could be condoned, a young negro brought here, kept imprisoned, beaten and starved, turned out into the street when he was thought to be dying, restored to health free of charge by a doctor who took pity on him, recognized by his former master, seized and shipped to the West Indies to be resold. The charity of the doctor, a Scotsman named Andrews, had been a main element in Ashton’s conversion; he had visited the man and the two had become friends, and associates in the cause of abolition.

  “So the captain released him without compulsion?” Jane said.

  “Yes, he had no choice. He was furious, of course, and violently abusive, but he did not dare to ignore the writ.”

  “You are pleased, then, with the outcome?”

  Ashton paused on this with a certain caution. He was at the opposite pole to the politician, who leaps to claim credit for any success, however slight or incidental. All the passion of his nature was fixed on achieving a success that would be not partial but complete, that would put an end to this iniquitous traffic in human beings. And he feared in his darker moments that his limited means and small political influence made such success unlikely in his lifetime. When he answered now, it was with a sort of reserve habitual to him. “The officer who served the writ says that he saw the poor fellow chained to the mast in a flood of tears. He was weeping still when they rowed him to the shore, but now it was for joy.”

  “So then we should call that a success, surely?”

  Ashton was pleased to hear her including herself in Evans’s rescue. He sometimes worried that his sister did not have sufficiently deep convictions. She almost never expressed large or general sentiments of a moral kind, or seemed interested in the broader movements of reform. She was active in charity and good works, especially where the homeless and destitute were concerned, but her zeal was limited, in Frederick’s view at least; it lay all in a rage for immediate betterment, for practical measures that might help people to help themselves.

  Unlike myself in this, he had often thought, as in other ways. She took little active part in the movement for abolition, though sometimes trying to persuade those among her acquaintance who professed sympathy to contribute to the costs of legal process and of lodging runaway negroes in safe houses pending the hearings. Mainly the sympathy was more expressed in drawing-room rhetoric than in any alacrity to part with money, as she had remarked to her brother with an assumption of lightness, almost of carelessness, in the irony, frequent with her though in him completely lacking. He did not understand it, this habit of raillery, of assumed indifference, except to think that at twenty-three years of age she had not so far been softened by love. There had been suitors, but none had been acceptable to her. He himself was unmarried and thought it likely he would remain so.

  He looked at her now for some moments without speaking. Her temperament was happier than his, he knew. She was very vividly present in this plainly furnished sitting room, in her dress of blue silk with hoop skirt cut to reveal the frill of petticoats and the white silk stockings and the pale blue satin slippers. Like him, she was Methodist in religion from earliest upbringing, and in her way she was devout; but she was pretty, more than pretty, and her figure was good, facts of which she was fully conscious; she was as fond of clothes and as observant of fashion as any young woman of spirit—and means—might be expected to be.

  “Well, as to success,” Ashton said at last, “that is a very relative matter, Jane. We have rescued him from being reenslaved, so much is true—or at least we have given him a respite. He is in safe keeping at present. No doubt Bolton will post up a bill offering a reward to any who find and return him.”

  “Bolton?”

  “His former owner. Open the London Gazette any day of the week and you will find several notices of the kind. We seek to uphold the law on behalf of black people held against their will or made captive when there is no charge against them, because that is the law of this country and should apply to all, whatever the color or the degree. And we can obtain release if there is clear illegality, and if we act in time.”

  “But that says a great deal for the fairness of our laws, does it not?”

  “Oh, a great deal,” he said, and the force of the sarcasm brought a sudden light into his eyes, always clear in their gaze and very striking in the narrow, delicately boned face, at present drawn with lines of weariness and strain. “And so the injustice can go on forever, while we proudly contemplate the perfect justice of our laws.”

  Jane felt the beginnings of a familiar exasperation at her brother’s unyieldingness, his refusal of comfort. “But you said yourself that the laws are applied.”

  “Most cases do not come to our notice at all. For every one saved there are a dozen taken by force from these shores to be sold in the West Indies or our American colonies, and worked to death there. And those who remain here are caught in the contradictions of the law. Let us imagine that we are at this moment attending a hearing on a plaint of unlawful detention of a black man or woman. The case goes our way, we succeed in obtaining release. Full of jubilation, we leave the courtroom, step round the corner and find a black child of seven or eight being sold at auction in a coffeehouse.”

  His voice, relating this, had fallen into a rhetorical mode, as if he were addressing more persons than one, the result of a feeling of isolation that descended on him, even with this sister whom he held in deep affection, a sense of the appalling obviousness of what he was saying, this overwhelming truth, which was not, however, by some ugly paradox, immediately plain to others.

  “Yes,” he said, “you can apply to a justice and he will grant you a writ. But no court in this land, in this England of ours, where we are so proud of the pure air of liberty, no court and no judge will take the essential step of denying the right of property in black people brought here from our colonies abroad. We have tried again and again to bring a case that will force the issue, and we have always failed. They do not dare to set a precedent that might bring the right of ownership into question. Liberty is sacred, of course, but only when it favors the slave owner.”

  He was silent for a moment or two and then said, with a sort of solemn indignation, “And now it seems I am to be sued by this Bolton on the grounds that by my intervention I have deprived him of a capital sum, namely the current value of a male slave in good condition at the Kingston slave market, where it was purposed to sell him.” Ashton shook his head. “It is lunacy,” he said. “A writ is served on a man for violent and flagrant disregard of the laws relating to the liberty of the subject, release of the abused person is secured and then you find yourself being sued for his value as a slave.”

  Something divided in his expression, some mixture of incredulity and ruefulness, struck her now as comical, and she laughed a little, at which he was visibly surprised for a moment. Then he smiled himself and nodded. “Yes,” he said, “you are right, it is ludicrou
s.”

  “You should laugh more, Frederick,” she said. “And you should divert yourself more. It does not mean that one cares less. And this is especially so now, with this case of the slave ship that has come before you, that one hears talk of all over town.”

  “No wonder there is talk. It is a most unusual case. In fact, I can’t remember anything like it. Not only for the circumstances, but for the appalling wickedness of the crime—those unoffending people, our fellow human beings, bound and cast overboard to drown, and all to save a few guineas. However, we may derive benefit from it.”

  “Derive benefit?” She had never grown used to her brother’s sudden changes from near to far in the way he viewed things. There were times, as now, when she felt a peculiar chill, a sense of dismay, at his ability to pass in a breath from compassion genuinely felt to considerations of strategy, to what might be turned to account.

  “The case has received widespread attention,” he said. “It has featured much in the newspapers—people are talking about it, and not only in London. It will give us an opportunity to bring the iniquities of the trade to public notice. There are two actions, entirely separate in law but closely bound together, both brought by the owner of the ship, a man who has made a fortune out of sugar—out of the slave trade, in other words.”

  “Yes,” Jane said. “Erasmus Kemp. We have met.”

  “Have you indeed? I did not know that.”

  “It was at the house of Sir Richard Sykes, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It seems that he and Mr. Kemp have some banking interest in common. As you know, his daughter Anne is a particular friend of mine.”

  “You said nothing of this.”

  “There was really nothing to say. Just a few minutes of conversation, quite unmemorable, with several others present.”