The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,29
the last hours of that colony of renegades, the approach through darkness, his tension of excitement kept under stern check, the stationing of the troops, the waiting for dawn. From the compound below there had come the sound of drum and fiddle and some kind of whistle or flute, a discordant music, sometimes passing into wild harmony. From the swamps all around the whine of mosquitos and the strange sharp clicking of young alligators as they snapped at frogs and turtles in the creeks. Those sounds, that night, the anticipation of capturing Paris and his motley associates and bringing them to justice—that had been happiness.
And now this sordid aftermath, this haggler of a broker coming with his “generous offer.” Kemp was shrewd in matters concerning money, with a shrewdness derived from years of business dealings. He knew he could have increased Van Dillen’s offer if he had been prepared to bargain. They would not want to risk an adverse judgment; none of the brotherhood at Lloyds would want a precedent established; increased indemnities on hazards to cargo could too easily be turned to the shipowners’ advantage. But this was a problem that did not concern him.
The triumph of the capture had not survived his hated cousin’s death. Nor had the hatred survived. This cousin, who had mortally offended him in childhood, who had been cast into Norwich Jail as a common prisoner and set in the pillory for printing seditious matter and denying Holy Writ, bringing disgrace on the whole family, who had led the crew of the Liverpool Merchant in mutiny and murder and made off with ship and cargo. A burden of accumulated bitterness lifted from his spirit by this death, but bringing neither freedom nor relief, only a sort of vacancy.
He had known it as he stood on the quarterdeck of the ship that was to bring them home, below that vast, all-encompassing sky, looking down at the men and women of the settlement and the children of their union. He had felt repugnance at the thought of white and black breeding together. Still in his hand the button Matthew had let fall as he died, a gift to the cousin who had hated him, who had brought the soldiers and ordered the shooting, a gift to the author of his death …
A thought of an unaccustomed kind came to him as he moved to reseat himself at his desk and resume the work that awaited him there. He had argued once, while still in Liverpool, with the girl he had wanted to marry, about a painting in her parents’ house, whether it was a painting of people in Paradise or just in a beautiful garden. Sarah and he had almost quarreled over it.
The people in the painting were happy and smiling and elegantly dressed, at ease in their surroundings. Somewhere there might be a place like this, a place where dwelt those who were caught and held in the anticipation of triumph, dwelling forever in some night of excited vigil, with the wild music sounding in their ears. Or even one for those who had realized their aims and were happy still. Somewhere there might be a piece of ground, a territory, where the following steps are also happy, the steps you take after the victory, after justice has been done and profits made, when you begin to walk away, when you return home …
Perhaps the coal fields of Durham might be such a place for him. The papers on the desk before him were mainly concerned with the mining industry. Since learning of Spenton’s desire for a loan he had spent a good deal of time studying production figures and methods of extraction in the eastern part of the county, toward the sea. He had talked to shipping agents, studied contracts made by the mine owners or their lessees with the lighter-men who loaded the coal at the wharfs of Hartlepool and carried it to the collier ships that would bring it down to the Pool of London. He had learned to his great satisfaction that the lease on Spenton’s mines was due to expire in a matter of weeks. He had worked out the terms of an offer that might be attractive to Spenton, linking the loan with revised conditions for the lease.
Spenton had not made any move to visit the bank, and Kemp, wanting to avoid all appearance of eagerness or haste, had waited for an invitation to the nobleman’s London house. Instead