The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,48
time and bore away.
Keeping Sadler still in attendance, Kemp went in now to see his father-in-law. “Well, sir,” he said, “and how are things with you today?”
“Ah, Erasmus, I am glad to see you.” The old man’s voice had lost nothing in clarity, nor in decisiveness and authority of tone. He never failed to recognize his son-in-law. Indeed, he recognized everybody. But his memories had lost all order and sequence, and he was often confused as to the time that things had happened—the distant past was the same to him as yesterday.
“There is something I particularly want you to do,” he said now.
“What is that, sir?”
The old man gave him a glance at once fiery and fearful under gray, disheveled eyebrows. His shirt was open at the neck to show the stringy tendons of his throat, and his scant hair stood in wisps of disarray around his head.
“We were all dressed and ready a half-hour ago, sir,” Sadler said. “But we have started a new game now, hiding things in odd corners. Orders for wigs are issued frequent-like, but we will not on any account keep one settled on our head for more than a few minutes. As soon as your back is turned, the wig is off and stowed away somewhere.”
The old man plucked at Kemp’s sleeve, drawing him forward. “A word in private,” he said, directing a look of sharp suspicion at Sadler.
Kemp allowed himself to be led into the inner room, where Sir Hugo had his writing implements and his desk, with drawers that could be locked. It was in this sanctum that the old man spent his days, entangled in financial dealings that went back half a century.
“I am no longer sure that I can trust Sadler,” he said now. “More than once lately I have felt inclined to dismiss him.”
He went to one of the drawers in the bureau, unlocked it with a key that he took from his pocket and took out two folded sheets. “I want you to see that these are properly delivered,” he said.
Kemp opened them and read them, one after the other. The first was a bill drawn on the Bank of England to be discounted by a Manchester firm for the export of woolen goods to Lisbon in exchange for an equivalent value in gold bullion. Sir Hugo had founded the bank’s fortunes on Portuguese bullion obtained from the country’s mines in Brazil, and he had lately returned to the obstinate belief that this was still a hugely profitable trade, despite the fact that the supply of gold had dried up thirty years ago. The other paper was a promissory note addressed to the bank’s agent in Jamaica for a sum of two thousand pounds. This was one of a regular series; the old man was still purchasing negroes, or so at least he believed.
Kemp had tried and failed on various occasions to reason with his father-in-law, but he could never resist the temptation to try again. It was this obsessive buying of slaves that had led Sir Hugo into madness, and if he could be argued out of it he might be restored to sanity—or so at least his son-in-law believed. Kemp had little patience with mental disorder, regarding it in the main as an acute form of error, something that could be mended if sufficient evidence to the contrary were advanced. The old man clung to the belief that abolition of the trade was imminent, a matter of days or weeks; he was constantly issuing instructions for the purchase of negroes, whatever their age or condition of health, convinced that when abolition passed into law he would be compensated on a per capita basis at the market price, regardless of value.
“Sir, there is no reason whatever to think that abolition will come soon, there is no sign of it, the movement has almost no following in the country. Let us consider the figures a little.” He had himself, as deriving large profits from the West India sugar trade, given considerable attention to the figures over a good many years. “The nation needs sugar, as you rightly asserted in your recent note to Lord North.”
“I wrote to his lordship, did I? I know ’twas my intention.”
“Yes, sir, you did. You do well to keep the matter present to his lordship’s mind. The consumption of sugar is deeply entrenched among the people. There would be great unrest in the land if the supply were to decline, let alone fail