The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,16
in him completely lacking. He did not understand it, this habit of raillery, of assumed indifference, except to think that at twenty-three years of age she had not so far been softened by love. There had been suitors, but none had been acceptable to her. He himself was unmarried and thought it likely he would remain so.
He looked at her now for some moments without speaking. Her temperament was happier than his, he knew. She was very vividly present in this plainly furnished sitting room, in her dress of blue silk with hoop skirt cut to reveal the frill of petticoats and the white silk stockings and the pale blue satin slippers. Like him, she was Methodist in religion from earliest upbringing, and in her way she was devout; but she was pretty, more than pretty, and her figure was good, facts of which she was fully conscious; she was as fond of clothes and as observant of fashion as any young woman of spirit—and means—might be expected to be.
“Well, as to success,” Ashton said at last, “that is a very relative matter, Jane. We have rescued him from being reenslaved, so much is true—or at least we have given him a respite. He is in safe keeping at present. No doubt Bolton will post up a bill offering a reward to any who find and return him.”
“Bolton?”
“His former owner. Open the London Gazette any day of the week and you will find several notices of the kind. We seek to uphold the law on behalf of black people held against their will or made captive when there is no charge against them, because that is the law of this country and should apply to all, whatever the color or the degree. And we can obtain release if there is clear illegality, and if we act in time.”
“But that says a great deal for the fairness of our laws, does it not?”
“Oh, a great deal,” he said, and the force of the sarcasm brought a sudden light into his eyes, always clear in their gaze and very striking in the narrow, delicately boned face, at present drawn with lines of weariness and strain. “And so the injustice can go on forever, while we proudly contemplate the perfect justice of our laws.”
Jane felt the beginnings of a familiar exasperation at her brother’s unyieldingness, his refusal of comfort. “But you said yourself that the laws are applied.”
“Most cases do not come to our notice at all. For every one saved there are a dozen taken by force from these shores to be sold in the West Indies or our American colonies, and worked to death there. And those who remain here are caught in the contradictions of the law. Let us imagine that we are at this moment attending a hearing on a plaint of unlawful detention of a black man or woman. The case goes our way, we succeed in obtaining release. Full of jubilation, we leave the courtroom, step round the corner and find a black child of seven or eight being sold at auction in a coffeehouse.”
His voice, relating this, had fallen into a rhetorical mode, as if he were addressing more persons than one, the result of a feeling of isolation that descended on him, even with this sister whom he held in deep affection, a sense of the appalling obviousness of what he was saying, this overwhelming truth, which was not, however, by some ugly paradox, immediately plain to others.
“Yes,” he said, “you can apply to a justice and he will grant you a writ. But no court in this land, in this England of ours, where we are so proud of the pure air of liberty, no court and no judge will take the essential step of denying the right of property in black people brought here from our colonies abroad. We have tried again and again to bring a case that will force the issue, and we have always failed. They do not dare to set a precedent that might bring the right of ownership into question. Liberty is sacred, of course, but only when it favors the slave owner.”
He was silent for a moment or two and then said, with a sort of solemn indignation, “And now it seems I am to be sued by this Bolton on the grounds that by my intervention I have deprived him of a capital sum, namely the current value of a male slave in good condition at