The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,13

paperweight in the form of a Moor’s head.

He could find no comfort or reassurance in any of these things, even as their familiarity returned. They expressed him, they consorted with his state, that was all. It was the same with his mansion in St. James’s Square: silk hangings and ormolu clocks and Italian stucco and mahogany paneling—costly furnishings, as befitted his wealth, but no more to him than that.

He found himself thinking now of his parents’ house in Liverpool and of his bedroom there, the things in it that had been dear to him, abetting him in his hopes, consoling him in his disappointments: the silver cockspurs and the brace of dueling pistols on the wall, this the gift of his father; the framed embroidery done by his mother, Blessed Are the Meek, the words picked out in dark blue stitches surrounded by forget-me-nots and white roses. Like many persons of fanatical character, Kemp was deeply superstitious, though he would have been highly indignant to hear the word applied to him. The objects in that room, so clearly remembered, had solemnized his love for Sarah Walpert and his intention to marry her; they had sorrowed with him at her loss; they had witnessed his vows to go into sugar and repay his father’s debts.

The rage was spent in him now, to leave a feeling almost of desolation. It had only been the news of Sullivan’s escape that had quickened him to fury. Sullivan, who had been so devoted to Matthew, had attended him when he lay dying. The fellow had had the presumption, in chains with the others as he was, to ask for the return of his fiddle on the grounds that it was personal property. Kemp had remembered this insolence and the look of the man as he made the request, the long, dark hair unkempt, tied back with a ragged scrap of cotton, the blue eyes at once vague and quick-glancing, as if he had glimpsed something splendid the moment before and was trying to find it again. There had been tears in those eyes when Matthew was nearing his end, and Kemp had felt it as an insult, this grief for his cousin, who had led the crew in mutiny and murder and piracy, an insult to the high sense of justice that had taken him halfway across the world to bring these men to account for their crimes, his cousin chief among them, and so avenge the father who had hanged himself rather than face the shame of bankruptcy.

His mind flinched away from thoughts of his father fumbling with the noose in the dark. There was no high mission of justice now; it had gone with his cousin’s death, gone while he stood on the deck, feeling the immensity of his defeat, clasping the brass button that Matthew had let fall as he spoke his dying words. Something about hope … There was no knowing how his cousin came to be clutching the button in these last moments of his life. Kemp remembered that his first impulse, on mounting again to the quarterdeck, had been to throw it overboard, into the sea. Then it had come to him that it was a kind of gift, though accidental, and he had put it away in his pocket. It had stayed in his pocket throughout the voyage home and he had kept it since, without really knowing why. Because of the mystery surrounding it, the button had become a sort of talisman. Over the course of time the sense of accident had been replaced in Kemp’s mind with an opposite feeling of design, as if he had been meant to have it all along. It lay now in a drawer of his desk; he took it out and looked at it sometimes, and remembered how his cousin had glared across the cabin before he died, and spoken loudly, as if answering some urgent question.

Still he stood there, glancing indifferently at the objects in the room. He had done everything that was practical and needful. He had sold the negroes in Charles Town and used the money to buy a share in a cotton plantation some miles inland; he had seen his cousin buried in consecrated ground; he had brought the surviving members of the crew back to London to have their crimes and their punishment published widely. He had always been sure of being in the right, always sure that his reasons were impeccable and would stand