The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,14

up to any scrutiny. He was no less convinced of it now, as he stood there. But his conviction of moral rectitude and commercial shrewdness brought no slightest warmth or comfort to him.

He had thought this sense of being trapped in shadows when he should be out in the sun might be due in some measure to his wife’s death. She had died while he was in Florida, of a distemper caused by poisoning of the blood, the doctors said. They had not been happy together, and in fact had lived largely separate lives during these last years. He had not loved his wife, though in the days of courtship he had professed love for her. She was Sir Hugo Jarrold’s daughter, she had wanted him, and her father was accustomed to give her what she wanted. He, for his part, had been driven by the need to repay the debts his own father had left. It had not been long before she discovered the betrayal, and she had gone on to betray him in her turn, many times over. In spite of this, he felt the more alone for her going. His mother too had died while he was away. The knowledge that he had not been there by her side at the moment of her death had clouded his homecoming with a guilt he knew to be unreasonable but which was no less real to him for that.

He thought of Jane Ashton again, and with the thought came some lightening of his mood. Not five minutes after the words they had exchanged and her smile when she looked away, his host, Sir Richard Sykes, who sometimes acted as guarantor of the bank’s credit abroad, had drawn him aside to tell him that an acquaintance, Lord Spenton, was interested in applying to the bank for a loan.

Sykes had told him something about Spenton’s situation, and he had investigated further. There were debts here and there, some of them fairly substantial. Spenton owned large tracts of land in the County of Durham. More importantly, from the bank’s point of view, he owned all the coal that lay below these acres. His mines were not so profitable as they should be, considering their advantageous position close to the coast. It had immediately seemed to Kemp an opportunity for investment of a kind long meditated and hoped for. He had told Sykes that the bank would be ready to discuss the loan, and he was waiting now for some further word from Spenton, who was taking his time over it. This waiting, the prospect of getting into the coal trade, was at present the only thing that gave any glow of promise to Kemp’s feelings about the future.

Not five minutes after that smile of hers, he thought again. It was as if she had blessed the enterprise even before either of them knew of it.

4

Jane regarded her brother with the expression she reserved for his accounts of his doings: solicitous, affectionate, marked by a slight pretense of disbelief. She was the younger by twelve years—they were the only two that had survived childhood—and she admired his earnestness of purpose, though sometimes, when this became relentless, she grew impatient at it and in a way rebellious.

“You look tired,” she said. “Would you like more tea?” He was not a robust man, and the calls he made on himself taxed him sometimes beyond his strength.

Ashton held out his cup to be replenished. “I have been rushing to and fro like a madman all day.”

“Did you manage to save the man?”

The question concerned a negro from the Gold Coast who went by the name of Jeremy Evans. After residing quietly in Chelsea for three years gaining a living as a porter, he had been seen and recognized by his former owner, who had brought him from the sugar fields of Barbados and from whom he had run away once on British soil. On this man’s orders Evans had been kidnapped the previous evening, tied and gagged, carried to Gravesend and rowed out to a ship bound for Jamaica, to be sold as a slave on arrival.

“It turned out that the captain was in the plot,” Ashton said. “I think it probable that he was promised a commission on the sale. As you know, we had obtained from the Rotation Office a warrant for Evans’s release and had it sent to Gravesend, where the ship was lying. But it came to me that with the ship