The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,12

one. The mutiny can be said to have begun, and so we shall plead, when your cousin raised his hand against the throwing overboard of the sick negroes, still alive as they were. We shall have Barton’s testimony to support us in this. Now there is no question of felony up to this point, none at all. The slaves were cast into the sea in order to claim the insurance on them.”

“Lawful jettison,” Kemp said. “There was a shortage of water—barely enough for the crew. Barton will testify to that also. I am fully entitled to the insurance money, every penny of it, as owner of the ship through my father.”

“Quite so, sir, we are in complete accord. But the insurers are contesting the claim, as you know; they will say the jettisoning was not lawful, they will say there was water enough. Now it is in our interest to keep these two actions entirely separate, and seek to have the question of insurance settled in the Court of Common Pleas, not at the Old Bailey, where it might become confused with the criminal charges. We cannot know for the time being what line the defense will take, but I am supposing they will seek to have our arguments of lawful jettison absorbed into what they will see as the essential issue, which is that the jettison would have been unlawful, and even criminal, under any circumstances.”

“How can that be? It makes no sense.”

“Well, I think they will maintain that it is a crime under any circumstances to throw living persons over the deck of a ship on the only grounds that they are sick and like to die.”

“It is a contagion of madness,” Kemp said. “We are talking about the ship’s cargo. The negroes were acquired by lawful purchase on the Windward Coast of Africa. They were to have been sold at Kingston slave market in accordance with established practice. How can they be regarded as other than cargo?”

He had the sensation, frequent with him since his return, of arguing with himself, or with some shadowy person not quite himself, someone whom he urgently needed to convince but who constantly framed arguments more weighty than his own. For twelve years, in that wilderness, they had lived free, black and white together. Free but not equal: there must have been struggles for power and precedence among them, this was a natural feature of any human society. But the inequalities, whatever they were, would not have depended on color or race. And the people had lived in understanding of this; they had shared the women, they had shared the parentage of the children …

“It is madness,” he said again.

“Entirely so, sir, we see eye to eye on the matter. But the law has to deal with divergent interests.” The lawyer brought his palms together, then slowly moved them apart. “The law has to stretch, sir,” he said. “They will maintain that it was murder.”

“Killing the ship’s captain when he was about the lawful exercise of his duties, that is not murder, I suppose?”

“They might claim, they will claim, that it was justified as preventing the numerous murders that might have followed.” With this Pike rose to his feet. “I will not occupy your time any further,” he said. “I judged it needful that you should know of these developments.” He stood for a moment longer, smiling at Kemp, who had also risen. “Have no fear,” he said. “We shall prevail. Property is the key to the business. If they fight us on property, they are bound to lose. The Lord Commissioners appointed by the Admiralty will have a high regard for property. We must hope for a judge with good understanding, someone with holdings in the West Indies, or at any rate with a stake in the trade.”

When Pike had gone Kemp returned to his desk and remained there for a time that passed blankly, without his noting it. Then he rose and went to his window and looked down for some moments through the thick distorting glass at the blur of the traffic below. When he turned back toward the room, it was for a brief while as though everything in it were strange to him. As if seen for the first time, the framed watercolors, the ledgers and the account books on their shelves, the broad table with its silver-mounted inkstand and its japanned tray, where lay his paperknife with the mother-of-pearl handle, and his seals, and his ivory