The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,101
on the road, of whom he sometimes thought, wandering from place to place, getting older. He might lay his fiddle aside and seek work on a coaster, carrying freight down south or across the sea to Holland. But the Liverpool Merchant had given him enough of the sea to last a lifetime. He was well past his first youth and did not really care for the idea of hauling on the ropes again and risking a rupture.
It took him four days to reach the village of Thorpe, place of his pilgrimage, and he was never to forget his first sight of it. He approached through high, moorland country, and a turn in the road brought him in late afternoon to a sudden view of the village lying below him. This, then, was where Billy Blair had come from, this was what he had run away from. Four streets, seventy or eighty low-built, crouching houses with gray slate roofs. The sulfurous smoke from coal fires lay like a mist over the whole village, hanging motionless under an overcast sky. He saw what looked like a store at the crossing of the streets, and close to this a stone-built tavern. Beyond the shrouded houses he saw the vaporous gleam of salt pans, and the sour smell of heated brine carried to him. Seen thus from above, it seemed like a vision of the inferno to Sullivan, with in the far distance the dark silver, luminous strip of the sea, like a land of the blessed, a promise lost forever to these souls succumbing amid the smoke. It was as if this dark cluster of houses had been set down within the fields to live in eternal malodor, and for no other reason.
The sight of the sea brought him a sort of reversed memory: standing off the coast of Africa, looking from sea to land, the smoke rising from the shore fires, first sign of life, announcing that there were slaves for sale. Then the fumes of smoke from the deck, like an answer, rising from the braziers where they were bringing the branding irons to red heat.
As he descended the long slope and drew nearer to the village, he heard the hiss and clank that came from the shafts of the mine, and saw here and there, approaching the village from the fields beyond, figures walking slowly, as if summoned by these noises. He saw with something of a shock that their faces were black. He was an impressionable man, and he had never seen a mining village before. He was so taken with the sooty, infernal looks of the returning miners that it did not occur to him to ask himself what these people would make of a wild-haired, staring, shambling man with a fiddle over his shoulder. He had cause to do this, however, not much later. As he came to the foot of the slope, where the ground leveled out and the moor gave way to rough pastureland, he saw the figures of children running this way and that in the field next to the one he was crossing. Five or six small figures he made out. He could see no pattern in their movements at first, they seemed aimless; then he saw the dip and rise of some fluttering creature struggling to be free, flying trammeled in a way no bird could have flown, and he realized, as he drew nearer, that the boys were flying a kite, diamond-shaped, with long, trailing streamers.
Intent on watching the erratic plunges and soarings of the kite, the children did not see him until he was through the gate in the hedge and halfway across the field where they were. “Hey, lads!” he shouted, raising his right arm in greeting. For some moments they stared at him across the decreasing distance. Then, without the slightest pause or consultation among themselves, three of them took flight in the direction of the first houses of the village.
The boy managing the kite was Percy Bordon, and he could not run without letting go of the bobbin that held the string and so consigning the kite to the final freedom of the skies. For a moment or two, as alarmed as his mates by this apparition with a mane of hair and a stump growing out of his shoulder, he thought of doing this. But the kite was precious to him, and he was heartened by the fact that Billy had stayed by him and not