The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,15
cleared and ready to sail, the captain might refuse to obey the summons, or pretend he never received it, which in fact was what he did.” Ashton paused to sip some of his tea. “This is doing me a power of good,” he said, smiling at his sister.
Jane kept house for him and made sure the servants performed their duties, just as she tried to make sure she performed her own. She was capable of considerable severity with them, as with herself, at any scanting or neglect. It was a lesson learned from her mother—both parents were dead now. She knew how her brother liked his tea and took care to see it was made as it should be. He was ascetic in his tastes; it was rarely that he touched alcohol in any form.
“I knew that the only thing he would take notice of was a writ of habeas corpus,” he said. “I had to go first to the Lord Mayor and then to Justice Winslow, and spend time waiting, before I could obtain the writ. Then it had to be served on the captain aboard his ship. We were lucky. Two hours more and she would have been setting sail.”
“Mr. Evans was the lucky one,” she said. “He will have cause to remember you.” Others too, she thought. For a good number of years now Frederick had given all his energy, and spent much of his private fortune, in contesting the right of property in other human beings, particularly when attempts were made to assert this right in England. It had been revulsion at a brutal case of reenslavement that had brought him to embrace this cause, and so changed his life. Stronger than revulsion had been shame and a sort of remorse that such things could happen on English soil, that they could be condoned, a young negro brought here, kept imprisoned, beaten and starved, turned out into the street when he was thought to be dying, restored to health free of charge by a doctor who took pity on him, recognized by his former master, seized and shipped to the West Indies to be resold. The charity of the doctor, a Scotsman named Andrews, had been a main element in Ashton’s conversion; he had visited the man and the two had become friends, and associates in the cause of abolition.
“So the captain released him without compulsion?” Jane said.
“Yes, he had no choice. He was furious, of course, and violently abusive, but he did not dare to ignore the writ.”
“You are pleased, then, with the outcome?”
Ashton paused on this with a certain caution. He was at the opposite pole to the politician, who leaps to claim credit for any success, however slight or incidental. All the passion of his nature was fixed on achieving a success that would be not partial but complete, that would put an end to this iniquitous traffic in human beings. And he feared in his darker moments that his limited means and small political influence made such success unlikely in his lifetime. When he answered now, it was with a sort of reserve habitual to him. “The officer who served the writ says that he saw the poor fellow chained to the mast in a flood of tears. He was weeping still when they rowed him to the shore, but now it was for joy.”
“So then we should call that a success, surely?”
Ashton was pleased to hear her including herself in Evans’s rescue. He sometimes worried that his sister did not have sufficiently deep convictions. She almost never expressed large or general sentiments of a moral kind, or seemed interested in the broader movements of reform. She was active in charity and good works, especially where the homeless and destitute were concerned, but her zeal was limited, in Frederick’s view at least; it lay all in a rage for immediate betterment, for practical measures that might help people to help themselves.
Unlike myself in this, he had often thought, as in other ways. She took little active part in the movement for abolition, though sometimes trying to persuade those among her acquaintance who professed sympathy to contribute to the costs of legal process and of lodging runaway negroes in safe houses pending the hearings. Mainly the sympathy was more expressed in drawing-room rhetoric than in any alacrity to part with money, as she had remarked to her brother with an assumption of lightness, almost of carelessness, in the irony, frequent with her though