The Quality of Mercy: A Novel

  This was the man who had taken him and set him here in this hateful, choking closeness to others, a closeness there was no escaping, that had brought out a spirit of murder in him—not against his mates, who were caged and helpless as he was, but against those outside, those who had done this to him, who still lived in freedom.

  “He put it to us fair and square,” Barber said. “There was the bosun an’ the first mate an’ the cooper, Davies, an’ me. We was all the officers what was left, d’ye see, sir?”

  “Not the doctor?”

  “No, sir, Mr. Paris was laid up with a fever. Well, he was comin’ out of it, but he was keepin’ to his quarters below. I think we all knowed that was why Thurso called the meeting when he did.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Them two never got on. Thurso didn’t want no argument, he never liked anyone goin’ agin him.”

  “I see, yes. So he put the matter to you …”

  “The slaves was dyin’, we had been blown off course, we was still a good many days from Jamaica. Them as died aboard was of no value, but if they was jettisoned with lawful cause the ship’s owner could claim insurance. Thurso said he would make sure every man jack of us got a piece of that money.”

  “It is easy to promise money that is not your own,” Ashton said. “Would you be ready to swear in court that the captain offered you a bribe to do as he wished?”

  It was a false move, too precipitate; he saw it immediately in the faces that were turned to him, the stillness that seemed to descend on the forms of the men as they stood there against the wall. No answer was made to his question. After some moments the carpenter said, “Then there was the shortage of water, sir, that was what made it legal-like.”

  “Are you sure water was short? Had you been placed on rations?”

  “That I don’t remember,” Barber said. “Any of you lads remember if we was rationed for water?”

  No reply came to this, and there was no movement among the men.

  “There had been copious rain during the night, or so I am given to understand,” Ashton said.

  “Water was short,” Hughes said. “We was aboard the ship an’ you wasn’t.”

  In spite of himself and the resolution of forbearance he had made, Ashton stiffened at the insolence of this, and raised his head to meet the man’s gaze directly. He saw dark eyes that made no move to evade his own; there was a fire of violence in them such as he had rarely seen. For the first time he felt glad of the presence of the armed guards just beyond the gate. He needed only to raise his hand to summon them.

  “Please listen to me,” he said. “I understand why you should want to maintain the legality of drowning your fellow human beings—for that is what they were, made in God’s image, just as you and I are, and completely unoffending. But there is no protection for you in this, even if it could be proved. It is no defense, with the capital charges of murder and piracy you will be facing, to plead that the jettison was lawful, that you were laboring under necessity. That is the line the ship’s owner will take, Mr. Erasmus Kemp. He will be supported in it by the testimony of the first mate, Barton. By asserting that there was a shortage of water, you will only succeed in helping Kemp to obtain the insurance money he is claiming on the deaths of these poor people. Surely you can see that? Kemp is the man who brought you to this ruin.”

  No answer came to this, and he saw no change in the attitude of the men. He had been too optimistic. How could they regard him as a friend, as someone who desired to help them? He came from the world outside the prison, the world that asks questions, calls people to account. He needed their trust, he was exerting himself on their behalf, but it was not to save them from the gallows—this he admitted freely to himself. Their ultimate fate did not really matter to him, he did not feel concerned in it. Through them, through the public notice they might draw to this atrocious crime, thousands of lives might be changed, might be saved.

  He still had his appeal to make. He had been wrong to hint at blame. It was essential now to get them back to the narrative, bring them together again in the effort of recollection. “So all the crew were involved in it?” he said. “In the casting them over, I mean.”

  “Yes, all of us,” Barber said. “That is, all of us ’cept for Morgan and Hughes. Morgan was in the galley an’ Hughes was up aloft, keepin’ an eye out for the weather.”

  Once more Ashton encountered that fearsome regard. Unlike Morgan, Hughes had not tried to exculpate himself; he had not deigned to.

  “We had to make a ring round them in case they tried to run,” Barber said.

  “I was one of them that done the handlin’,” the one-eyed man said. “Me an’ Haines an’ Wilson was the ones that hoisted them over.” It was clear that he had misunderstood the whole tone of the conversation, the defensiveness of his shipmates. He had spoken in an ingratiating manner, addressing himself directly to Ashton, as if it were a mark of his virtuous character that such a trust should have been placed on him. “Us bein’ the strongest,” he said. “Me an’ Haines was close, both bein’ London men.”

  “Haines was the bosun, dead now,” Barber said. “He was killed by Indians in Florida when we was first tryin’ to settle there.”

  “Haines got what he deserved. He was a bastard of a flogger an’ you was his lick-spittle, Libby.”

  This came from Hughes, who had briefly transferred the anguish of his rage to the hulking man beside him. That Libby made no direct reply to this was a sign, as it seemed to Ashton, both of the truth of the assertion and of the menace that emanated from the speaker.

  “Haines was set over us,” Libby said, for all answer, adding after a moment, “I am a man what respects them that is set over us.”

  His single eye was flickering, as if the light in the yard were too strong. It came to Ashton that he might be on the way to blindness. He was clearly a man by nature subservient, eager for the protection of authority, a tendency likely to grow stronger if sight were failing him. He might be useful. If handled in the right way, he might be persuaded to go counter to the version of events the others had collectively agreed on. Worth remembering, in any case …

  “And so this business was halted by the appearance on deck of Matthew Paris, the ship’s surgeon?”

  “That is correct, sir, he came up from his sickbed onto the quarterdeck an’ he held up his hand an’ cried out agin it.”

  “I see, yes.” A sudden vision of that distant intervention came to Ashton: the rain-washed deck, the cry, the raised hand, the violent aftermath. “That is what gave you pause,” he said.

  A thin, fair-haired man standing beside Libby now spoke for the first time. “We was busy keepin’ the ring, keepin’ a watch for any that tried to run. We didn’ know at first where the shout come from—it was like it come from the sky, an’ he was pointin’ up to the sky when he come forward.”

  “That is Lees, sir,” Barber said, performing once again the duty of introduction he had assumed. “He is in the right of it, I think we all felt somethin’ sim’lar. There was two that didn’ wait for us,” he added after a moment. “A man an’ a woman. They run an’ jumped over the side together before anyone could lay a finger on them. They might of been related, I dunno. Mebbe like man an’ wife or brother an’ sister. We took them aboard an’ stowed them below, men on one side, women on the other, without thinkin’ much if they might be related. It was a thought that only came to me later. To tell you the truth, sir, it is not easy to recall these things an’ not easy to talk about them, for most of us at least.”

  He had glanced round at Libby as he uttered these last words. It was clear that this self-proclaimed friend of the dead bosun was not very popular among them. Also worth remembering …

  “Why is that?”

  “We lived together, we got to know one another, good and bad. Twelve years, sir, you gets a diff’rent view. There was fewer women than men—the women had to be shared by agreement, so as to avoid fightin’ over it. The women had to
agree too, as it was decided there was to be no forcin’ of the women. When you are all sharin’ together, who is black an’ who is white don’t weigh much on the scale. As a way of judgin’ folk, I mean.”

  The legal case that could be made out of the murder of the slaves and the mutiny that followed had mainly occupied Ashton’s thoughts up to now; he had not speculated much about how the survivors had lived afterward in their settlement, and it had not occurred to him that there would have been this sharing among them. He felt immediately repelled, and faintly sickened at the thought of it, black and white fornicating together by turns, a thing displeasing to God and man alike, producing a mixed race. It was not to further promiscuity of this sort that he was fighting to free the enslaved. Once free, they would be happy to return to Africa, to find dignity and prosperity among their own people. On the other hand, the deeper understanding that had come about through this experience of life together in community, if it could be voiced in court, might have an effect on the jury, as showing the absurdity of asserting a right of property in one’s fellows on the grounds of race or color.

  He took care to let nothing of these thoughts show in his face or manner. It was time now to make his promise to them—first the promise, then the appeal. “You are kept in chains, I believe,” he said. “Everything has a price here, so it seems, and I will make sure that you are not fettered again, at least until they bring you for the hearing. And I will contrive matters so that you will get regular and wholesome meals.”

  He saw Barber glance sharply round at the others. Libby smiled in ugly fashion, and a look of wondering delight appeared on the half-witted man’s face.

  “We are beholden to you,” Barber said, and there were nods among the men, and one or two exclamations of agreement. There was no softening in Hughes’s regard, however.

  “I want to make an appeal to your reason and your self-interest,” Ashton said. “There is only one way for you to escape hanging. If you will plead that you mutinied on grounds of conscience, that you rose against the captain because you realized that you were engaged in murdering innocent men and women, then you will have a chance of life. There would be no real falsehood in such a statement, only a shifting of the time. After all, you came to this realization later, during your years in the settlement. It will be argued against you that this change of heart was belated, too much so to carry conviction, as it did not occur until many had already been cast overboard to drown. But you can make reply that you were under the orders of the captain, whom you were accustomed to obey. When Divine Mercy intervened, in the person of the ship’s doctor, you saw the hideous error of what you were about and immediately ceased from it. If we can succeed in swaying the jury to that effect, it is more than likely that they will dismiss the capital charges on the grounds that there was no intention of harm, and you will go down in history as heroes of the antislavery movement.”

  And if we fail, he thought, and you end on the gallows, there is a chance that you will be seen as martyrs, and that is almost as good … But no, they were not the stuff of martyrs, or heroes either; they had no voice, no attitude, they represented nothing. If by some miracle of advocacy true justice could be done and these men declared guilty of murdering the slaves and hanged for it in full view, that would be the best solution of all. Beyond hoping for—Stanton would not risk such a plea. But what a wonderful thing it would be, what a triumph! A clarion call through all the years to come, sounding the note of justice and humanity to future generations.

  With this thought, his sense of differences among the men, a perception that had earlier taken him by surprise, altogether disappeared. They became once again in his eyes the featureless, amorphous body they had been before, a body that circumstance had deprived of all rights, made entirely subject to considerations of utility, of the higher and nobler purposes they could be made to serve.

  “If you do not make this plea,” he said, “you will have no defense against the charges of murdering the captain and making off with ship and cargo, since the slaves will be regarded in that light. You will be condemned and you will end on the cart to Execution Dock.”

  No reply of any kind came from the men assembled there. Ashton regarded them in silence for some moments, then said, “I leave the matter to your consideration. I will pray to Almighty God that you be guided to the right decision.”

  On this, he raised an arm and signaled to the guards waiting outside the gate.

  10

  “I should have suspected somethin’ there and then, when he said that about seein’ the power of music in me. How can anyone see the power of music in a man only by exchangin’ a few words? He must have been followin’ me, he must have seen me fiddle. But the notion did not enter me mind at the time, I was puffed up with pride an’ vainglory, I am not the man to deny that.”

  Several people were listening to this, or appearing to, all in a medium state of drunkenness, as was Sullivan himself. They were sitting round a fire of scraps and rags on a piece of waste ground in the town of Peterborough. “They is terrible cunnin’, some of these beastly fellers,” somebody said.

  “Lookin’ at it another way, I had spent a good part of the money, so the loss was not so grievous. Then there was this shillin’ that was left to me. Small things can lead to great, as various sages has observed at different times. A shillin’ is not a large sum, but when I discovered that shillin’ in me pocket, I knew the Blessed Virgin was still keepin’ me in the lamp of her eyes. It was at the first partin’ of the ways, one road was leadin’ to Watford, the other to St. Albans. I took a shillin’ out of me purse an’ tossed it an’ it come down for St. Albans.”

  “Aye, St. Albans, is it?” another man said. “I bin there.”

  “What it was, you see, I was only lately a purse-bearin’ man, an’ I was not intoirely in tune with the condition of it, so I did not think to put the shillin’ back in me purse, I stowed it in me pocket. Then it come back to me, a picture of meself, standin’ at the crossroads, spinnin’ up the coin.”

  He had seen the group round the fire, seen the Hollands passing among them and brought a pint from the nearby taphouse, so as to be friendly. “Then there was the pleasure of it,” he said, “feelin’ the edges of the shillin’ in me pocket. Pass the jar down, will you, it is stayin’ too long at that end.”

  Not much was left of his shilling now. Sixpence had gone in the course of the four days it had taken him to get here from Bedford, and twopence had gone on the gin. He felt entitled to a fair share of this, as also, it seemed, did the man sitting next to him, who had contributed nothing but readily seconded his request for the jar to be passed along. This was a lank, lantern-jawed, unshaven person, from the folds of whose being there emanated an odor of neglect strong enough to prevail against the fumes from the burning rags.

  “My friend, I understand you, I understand you well,” this man said. “It was the force of habit that saved you.” The gin was beginning to slur his speech slightly, but he had the accents of an educated man. “One of the strongest forces known to humankind,” he said. “I would put it on a level with instinct, in the sense that it is antecedent to reflection. If you had paused for thought, you would have replaced the shilling in the purse and so lost it along with the rest. You may find it hard to believe, but I have known force of habit to be urged in a court of law as a defense against the charge of murder.”

  “You know somethin’ of the courts, then?”

  This had come from the man on the other side of Sullivan. There was a woman sitting close by him; it seemed that these two were together.

  “Know something of the courts?” The man paused to take a drink from the jar. “I should think I do.”

  “Steady with the fluid,” Sullivan said, reaching out for it. He had to keep his hand extended for a considerable time before the jar was yielded up to him. Half of the gin was gone already. “My name is Michael,” he said. “Names are in order, seein’ as we are takin’ swallers from the same font.”
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  “Know something of the courts?” the man said again. “Simon Reedy is the name, a name that should have been known throughout the land, but for adverse circumstances and conspiracies against me. I was intended for the law, sir, I might say I was born for it. I practiced at the bar and was widely recognized as an up-and-coming man, a man marked out for greatness. Lord Chief Justice Reedy was the title prophesied by many, until through the plots of envious colleagues I was wrongly accused of falsifying documents and other malpractices of a similar kind, and struck off the list. As a consequence, I was forced to descend to the lower level of lawyer’s clerk in the London firm of Bidewell and Biggs.”

  “What was the case you was speakin’ of, where force of habit played such a part?”

  The question came from a ragged man sitting across from Reedy, on the other side of the fire.

  “The defendant had struck his wife a blow that knocked her off her feet. In falling she struck her head on a curb stone, fractured her skull and died on the spot. It emerged that it was this man’s common practice to strike his wife in moments of irritation. He had been doing so for many years. His counsel mounted an extremely effective defense on the grounds that the blow had been occasioned by pure force of habit and that the defendant could not therefore be said to have intended harm, in the sense that the law understands intention, as there had been no interval of time for intention to be formed. I will not disguise from you that I was the barrister who mounted that brilliant defense.”

  “What happened to him then?”

  “He was sentenced to five years’ penal servitude.”

  “The son of a whore, he got off light, they should of stretched his neck,” the woman said, speaking for the first time and with unexpected violence. “I would give ’im force of habit, I would put a bellyache in his broth every night till he croaked.”