The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,22

sitting. They had entered at the close of a song and the applause rang round them. Four men faced the audience on a raised platform. One of them, who had a drum slung across his chest, was black.

Sullivan gave his order to a man in an apron weaving through the crowd with a loaded tray. “We will do the payin’ when you do the deliverin’,” he said to the man, and then, to his companion, “I wasn’t born yesterday. There is such a thing as trustin’ our fellow man over an’ above what is reasonable. He might say he had niver had the money.”

Patrick Murphy’s reply to these words of wisdom was not audible, as at this moment there came a rattle from the drum and a sustained note from the oboe, and the group launched into song.

No weather can stay us when sailing for home,

No roads too rough for our steps to traverse …

It was in a way unlucky for Sullivan, in these special circumstances, that it should have been a song of exile and homesickness, and that one of the singers should have been a black man. He lost for some moments all sense of his surroundings, swept by a wave of sorrow and longing, remembering the last night of the settlement, when they had gathered to celebrate the birth of Neema and Cavana’s baby. He had played like a demon that night, there had been singing and dancing, the widow Koudi had smiled at him and he had felt he would not be unwelcome in her bed. All the while, unknown to them, the redcoats were waiting above them, among the trees, waiting for dawn, for the signal to attack …

Coming back to himself, he was aware of tears in his eyes. He turned his head to say something about the beauty of the singing, but Patrick Murphy was no longer there. And the sound of the voices was strangely muted as he thrust a hand into his coat pocket and found that the purse was no longer there either.

6

Bordon woke shortly before daybreak, as always; it was a habit that came from the long years of rising for work, an awareness of the changes of light that came to him in sleep and roused him. He was fully awake when the calls came from the alley outside, sad-sounding, more like a lament for the night gone than a welcome to the new day. It was the turn of Hardwick and his sons to shout the hour; they had no clock but they never failed, not like some who had one. Peter Hardwick claimed that he could tell when day was coming by a change in the cries of the owls that haunted the Dene, but this was not believed by everyone.

Nan rose at the call, put on a coat and went to see to the men’s bait, tie the lids across the cans to stop the food from spilling while they walked over the fields to the pit. There was a bag for each of the three, with a leather strap to go over the shoulder; they knew which bag was theirs, but what was inside the cans they only knew when they opened them. The contents varied from day to day: bread, pasties, hard-boiled eggs, bacon, cold potatoes—she saw to it herself and used what she had in the house and what she could find amid the sparse stock of the store. With three of them working there was money enough—they were not in debt for groceries, as many were.

Bordon rose and went to the door of the other bedroom, where his sons slept. The cottage was identical to all the others in the village, just as the yards behind were identical: three rooms, not counting the square-built chimney corner, all on one floor. He knocked and shouted, waited for an answering call and retired to the bedside to put on his pit clothes.

Percy woke at the knock, heard David muttering beside him; these two shared a bed, while Michael, as the eldest, had one of his own, a narrow pallet set against the wall. Percy tried to sleep again, turning away from the plaints of his brother, who was always slow to wake. He would stay in bed for another hour at least, not rising till it was full day, a privilege he tried to make the most of, knowing it would not last much longer now. Soon he would be going down with