The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,37

an ingratiating manner, addressing himself directly to Ashton, as if it were a mark of his virtuous character that such a trust should have been placed on him. “Us bein’ the strongest,” he said. “Me an’ Haines was close, both bein’ London men.”

“Haines was the bosun, dead now,” Barber said. “He was killed by Indians in Florida when we was first tryin’ to settle there.”

“Haines got what he deserved. He was a bastard of a flogger an’ you was his lick-spittle, Libby.”

This came from Hughes, who had briefly transferred the anguish of his rage to the hulking man beside him. That Libby made no direct reply to this was a sign, as it seemed to Ashton, both of the truth of the assertion and of the menace that emanated from the speaker.

“Haines was set over us,” Libby said, for all answer, adding after a moment, “I am a man what respects them that is set over us.”

His single eye was flickering, as if the light in the yard were too strong. It came to Ashton that he might be on the way to blindness. He was clearly a man by nature subservient, eager for the protection of authority, a tendency likely to grow stronger if sight were failing him. He might be useful. If handled in the right way, he might be persuaded to go counter to the version of events the others had collectively agreed on. Worth remembering, in any case …

“And so this business was halted by the appearance on deck of Matthew Paris, the ship’s surgeon?”

“That is correct, sir, he came up from his sickbed onto the quarterdeck an’ he held up his hand an’ cried out agin it.”

“I see, yes.” A sudden vision of that distant intervention came to Ashton: the rain-washed deck, the cry, the raised hand, the violent aftermath. “That is what gave you pause,” he said.

A thin, fair-haired man standing beside Libby now spoke for the first time. “We was busy keepin’ the ring, keepin’ a watch for any that tried to run. We didn’ know at first where the shout come from—it was like it come from the sky, an’ he was pointin’ up to the sky when he come forward.”

“That is Lees, sir,” Barber said, performing once again the duty of introduction he had assumed. “He is in the right of it, I think we all felt somethin’ sim’lar. There was two that didn’ wait for us,” he added after a moment. “A man an’ a woman. They run an’ jumped over the side together before anyone could lay a finger on them. They might of been related, I dunno. Mebbe like man an’ wife or brother an’ sister. We took them aboard an’ stowed them below, men on one side, women on the other, without thinkin’ much if they might be related. It was a thought that only came to me later. To tell you the truth, sir, it is not easy to recall these things an’ not easy to talk about them, for most of us at least.”

He had glanced round at Libby as he uttered these last words. It was clear that this self-proclaimed friend of the dead bosun was not very popular among them. Also worth remembering …

“Why is that?”

“We lived together, we got to know one another, good and bad. Twelve years, sir, you gets a diff’rent view. There was fewer women than men—the women had to be shared by agreement, so as to avoid fightin’ over it. The women had to agree too, as it was decided there was to be no forcin’ of the women. When you are all sharin’ together, who is black an’ who is white don’t weigh much on the scale. As a way of judgin’ folk, I mean.”

The legal case that could be made out of the murder of the slaves and the mutiny that followed had mainly occupied Ashton’s thoughts up to now; he had not speculated much about how the survivors had lived afterward in their settlement, and it had not occurred to him that there would have been this sharing among them. He felt immediately repelled, and faintly sickened at the thought of it, black and white fornicating together by turns, a thing displeasing to God and man alike, producing a mixed race. It was not to further promiscuity of this sort that he was fighting to free the enslaved. Once free, they would be happy to return to Africa, to find dignity and prosperity among their