The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,118
the voices retreated, struggling with a wild sense of improbability. It was as if the sounds of jubilation had not faded through distance but were somehow muted out of deference to this struggle of his, as he was carried back in mind to the quarterdeck of the ship that had borne them away from Florida, the people of the settlement, black and white, there in chains below him, the pain from the brass button, which he had been gripping so tightly that it had scored marks in his hand. Before this, the vague and beautiful eyes of the fiddler, his tears, his insolence …
He could not believe it still. But as the crowd thinned away, as some moments later he followed Spenton to the carriage that waited to take them back to Wingfield, he thought he heard sounds of fiddle music carried to him on the air.
“Is that the sound of a fiddle?” he said to the coachman, who was hovering nearby, ready to assist him in climbing up.
“Yes, sir,” the man said, “there is a fiddler come to Thorpe, the first that was ever here. He plays for them at the tavern.”
Kemp sat up late with Spenton, who was in festive mood. Between them they disposed of three bottles of champagne, and though Spenton drank much the most of this, Kemp, abstemious by nature and wary of indiscretion in his dealings with business associates—for this was all that Spenton was to him—felt his head clouded and confused as he made his way to bed, the ghost of the Irish fiddler still with him.
The phantasmic impression of resemblance came back to him in the moments before the fog of sleep descended, stronger, more distinct than before, bearing with it a conviction that owed its power to the superstition of his nature, grown more definite since his meeting with Jane Ashton, a sense of forces and currents that guided human destiny, controls that were arbitrary, accountable to nothing and no one … But if it had really been Sullivan, would he not have fled at once? Faced with the renewed threat of the hangman, would he have gone blithely on to the tavern to celebrate the occasion with his music? In the last moments of wakefulness the explanation came to him: the man could not have seen him; he had stood up only at the last moment; Sullivan, if it was he, had already gone past by then; before that, with the people standing packed together and the yard sloping only just enough to allow a view over the court, the people sitting below would probably not have been visible at all to any but those in the front rank.
The question was in his mind, throbbing at his temples along with the effects of the wine, when he rose next morning. It demanded an answer. Spenton, who seemed none the worse for wear, was intending to spend most of the morning closeted with his steward. This left Kemp free for some hours. He was intending to return to the mine to inspect the pumping equipment for use in the event of flooding, and after this—more important now to his mind—to ride over the fields that ran alongside the Dene and examine the lie of the land at the far end, where it opened out toward the sea.
But before he did anything else, he was resolved to pay a visit to the alehouse and have a look at this newly arrived fiddler.
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“He was the only one of them that had the power of sharin’,” Sullivan said. “The sister was grateful an’ the others took an interest, but he was the only one that could touch it in his mind. He shared Billy’s end, he shared the life we had in the wilderness, the kind of crops we had, the creatures that lived there with us.”
He was standing in the taproom close to Sally—as close as he could get without impeding her—while she restored the tankards, rinsed and dried, to their shelves. “An’ the reason for that,” he said, “the reason for that sharin’, lies in the power of imaginin’ a thing that you have niver lived through. It is the power of imaginin’ that makes a man stand out, an’ it is rarer than you might think. It is similar to the power of music.”
His back was to the yard door, which was open, and it was only when he heard steps that he turned.