The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,103

him that did, an’ then he played sommat on this fiddle he was carryin’, there is strings stretched over an’ tha scrapes across with a stick.”

“An’ he said he would be waitin’ at the alehouse?”

“Aye.”

“Well,” Nan said, “he can bide where he is for a bit. A s’ll have to wait for Bordon. A canna gan there on my own an’ he canna come here till Bordon is back from work an’ washed an’ ready.”

And so it came about that Sullivan waited longer at a quiet time of day and drank rather more ale than he had foreseen, which was fortunate in various ways. It led to a franker conversation with the keeper of the alehouse than might otherwise been the case, and it led to his getting a good look at a widow woman named Sally Cartwright, who served there.

The keeper had nothing to do with the mining of the coal; he was a tenant of the company, to which he paid a fixed monthly sum, all the proceeds over that going into his own pocket. When he learned that Sullivan’s total resources, once he had paid for the beer he had drunk, would amount to only fourpence, and that he had no further travels presently in mind, he served up a pint free of charge and asked for a tune.

Sullivan obliged with a lively rendering of “The Galway Piper” and followed this with the first lines of the song:

Every person in the nation

Or of great or humble station

Holds in highest estimation

Piping Tim of Galway.

The keeper rubbed his nose reflectively for a moment or two, then said, “Do you know any of the songs from round here, the miners’ songs?”

“No, niver a one. I know some of the Irish songs an’ some of the seagoing songs an’ bits of songs that I picked up in Liverpool, but that is the sum of it. I was niver in these parts before.”

“Well, but you could learn some. There is Sally, who does some serving round the tables. She is a local woman, she knows some songs, she sings to herself as she goes about.”

He went across the taproom as if to call down to the kitchen, three steps below. But before he could do so a woman came in, drying her hands on her apron. “That was a nice bit o’ singin’,” she said. “It was you, was it?” She smiled at Sullivan.

“This is Sally Cartwright,” the keeper said. “She could teach you some songs if she chose.”

She was brown-haired and brown-eyed and buxom. She said nothing more, but she gave Sullivan a smile he found distinctly beguiling. “I dare say she could,” he said.

“An Irish fiddler,” the keeper said. “Playing and singing. That would be something different. There is not another tavern between here and Hartlepool that would have the match of it. It would bring the lads in, and maybe the lasses too. Listen now, I’ll tell you what. You get board, and a bed in the outhouse and a shilling a week and a quart of ale a day, and you entertain the company in the mornings after eleven and in the afternoons starting at around four and going on while there are people to listen. What do you say?”

Sullivan was never afterward sure whether it was Sally’s smile and the promise of such a teacher or the prospect of bed and board and a regular shilling that swayed him, but it did not take him long to make up his mind. “I’m your man,” he said. And I would not mind being yours, he thought, glancing again at Sally. Subject to there being no one else in the offing … “Shillin’ in advance?” he said.

“No, I cannot go so far as that. With a traveling man, trust has to be built up gradual-like.”

So all was settled, and Sullivan’s prospects had undergone a radical change by the time the company arrived. This was more numerous than he had envisaged. There was Nan and Bordon and their three sons; there was Nan’s brother, John Blair, and his wife and their two daughters and two sons. And there were several hangers-on who had got wind of the business, among them, much to Bordon’s irritation, Arbiter Hill.

Sullivan had requested the loan of a comb and had done something to restore order to the wildness of his hair. He had washed the dust of the road from his face and laid aside fiddle and bow. So it was a modified version of