The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,20
day, when it was already dark. Guided by his new sense of himself as a traveling man with the power of purchase about him, he chose an inn in the high street with a good front, the Golden Cockerel, a name that seemed appropriate to his condition. The landlord, however, was not at first in full accord with Sullivan’s vision of himself, perhaps suspicious at the discrepancy between the good clothes and the wild hair and ragged beard. Then there was the Irish accent, the haggard looks, the vagabond’s fiddle over the shoulder. He wanted a shilling in advance, he said.
So it was the landlord of the Golden Cockerel who had the first sight of the purse and its contents. Sullivan was later to wonder whether this man, who smiled upon him when he saw the money, was in the plot too. But no shadow of doubt troubled him at the time; he took pleasure in the display, and bore himself in lordly fashion.
He dined well on sheep’s liver chopped and grilled, accompanied by roast potatoes, the whole washed down by a quart of ale. It was the best meal he had eaten for months, since the yams and sweet potatoes and marsh birds of the settlement. He slept soundly, breakfasted heartily and paid the balance of his score to the now friendly landlord.
It was a man transformed who walked down Bedford High Street that morning. To make matters even better, the weather had changed; he emerged from the inn to sunshine and a blue sky. It was the last day of March. Spring had arrived; he saw a cherry tree with buds of flower in a sheltered courtyard. Always mercurial, Sullivan felt his life to be full of blessings, and he began, as his habit was, to count them over. He was well clear of London, no one could know which way he was headed, there could be no alarm put out for him here. The fetid cell in Newgate Prison, where he had lain in fetters with his shipmates since arriving in England, the fear of the noose that had accompanied his days and nights—all this fell away from him. He was going to do his duty by poor Billy Blair. He was a man who kept his vows. And in the knowledge of this he held up his head and walked with a light step.
He had clear intentions for this morning. He would make the rest of his appearance tally with the coat and boots, the whole to be in perfect keeping with a purse-bearing man. A more prudent person, knowing the long journey that lay ahead, might have kept his money closer about him. But Sullivan was improvident by nature, and he had spent years in the wilderness of southeast Florida, where the future was not much considered except in terms of the weather it might bring.
First he purchased, for sixpence, a canvas bag suitable for a traveling man. Since he had no other possessions at all, it would do well for his fiddle and bow. His next care was to find a barber. The one he found was also a wigmaker and made efforts to sell Sullivan a white silk wig that would have cost him more than half his store. He resisted this, however. He was proud of his hair, which was dark and luxuriant.
“I am not enterin’ in the merits of wigs as such,” he said. “I know well that they are widespread throughout the land. There will be those with a thatch that is wearin’ sparse, there will be those that are wishin’ to make themselves stand taller. But a man with a head of hair like mine would niver want to hide his light under a bushel, though willin’ to admit he is become overgrown, consequent to a neglect that there was no avoidin’.”
After the shave he had his hair trimmed, pomaded and gathered at the nape with a silk ribbon of a dark green color to go with his coat. The cost of this was tenpence, the greater part of which was due to the ribbon.
From here, the mild sunshine on his face, the effluvium from his scented hair in his nostrils, he proceeded down the street until he found a journeyman tailor sitting stitching behind the window of his shop. From the stock of ready-made clothes inside he chose worsted breeches and a good calico shirt, changing into his new clothes behind a screen in the shop.