The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,47

had always been glad to leave, and always aware that she was glad to see him go. Now it was as if she had chosen to die while he was away in order to spare herself the tedium of further visits from him on his return. An illness mysterious in its causes and symptoms: increasing languidness, ravagement of the features, a drawn-out distemper or disorder of the blood. Ladies of fashion were more subject than others to this ailment, the doctors had told him. It was suspected that an excessive use of cosmetics played some part in it.

He thought of Jane Ashton’s face as she had looked on the occasion of their meeting—the only occasion so far. She had a radiance that needed no help from art. Perhaps there had been a little rouge on her cheeks. Her face had not really left him since that evening. Eyes that had not fled from his—it had been something like flight on his part that had brought him to compliment her on the gown she was wearing. The gown too had stayed in his memory, the bodice close-fitting, with a trimming of lace ruffles on the sleeves, and a lace fichu, transparent as the fashion was, allowing the beginning of the division between the breasts to be glimpsed. White silk, the petticoat … No detail could be left out, all had equal importance, all were somehow associated with his new enterprise. He had memorized them as he might have memorized a poem, a verse of magic power. Candid, that was the word for her looks. He felt a rush of need or desire, he could not tell which, somehow made keener by the impending visit to his father-in-law, a duty always disagreeable to him. He must find a way of seeing her again, in spite of the hostile brother; he would tell her of his plans, gain her approval …

These thoughts had unsettled him. He washed his face and hands in cold water and had tea brought to him by his manservant, Hudson. Then, wearing a plain calico dressing gown over his shirt and breeches, he made his way to the top floor of the house, where Sir Hugo had his quarters. He spoke first to Sadler, the keeper, who was quiet-voiced and stout of build, qualities he needed in equal measure, as there was occasion sometimes to soothe, sometimes to restrain his charge.

“Well,” Kemp said, “how is he today?”

“Much as usual, sir. We had a bit of trouble with our soup. We have written a letter to the Lord Chancellor and another to a wigmaker in Leadenhall Street, and there is a note for Lord North, to be delivered by hand.”

Kemp looked at the sheets of paper covered in his father-in-law’s spidery handwriting. The letter to the wigmaker was an order for a silvered silk toupee with bucklers, a pigtail queue and three rolled curls, the rolls to be hollowed.

“He has a great grasp of detail, sir.” Sadler was always deeply confidential when speaking of the deranged banker. “He leaves nothing to chance.”

The note to Lord North was in the form of a petition, urging him, as a friend of the king and close in counsel to His Majesty, to do all in his power to resist the movement for abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Kemp picked out a paragraph at random:

If abolition of the slave trade were to be carried out without reserve or condition, emancipation of the negroes would soon follow, and with this the interest of England in the West India islands would inevitably decline and die, the capital and property invested therein would at once begin to lose value and would before long entirely disappear, a sum of seventy million pounds by conservative estimate sunk without trace, causing a loss to the revenue of three millions. Sugar, now generally regarded as a necessity of life, will be quadrupled in price, to the discontent and dissatisfaction of the people, with the consequence that our Empire will be rent with dissension and ultimately dismembered …

The note would never be delivered. Sir Hugo would forget he had written it or forget when he had written it or believe it was something he still intended to write. So it was with the letter to the Lord Chancellor and that to the wigmaker. The old man spent most of the day at his writing desk and lived in the midst of a plethora of papers, which Sadler gathered from time to