The Quality of Mercy - By Barry Unsworth Page 0,49

altogether. It is purchased in British colonies, it is brought here in British ships. So long as this holds good, there can be no falling-off or slackening, we will continue to sell negroes and buy sugar. In fact, the movement is rather the other way. Last year eighty-two slave ships sailed out of Liverpool. When I went into sugar in 1755, only twelve years ago, there were fewer than forty. In the last half-century there has been a tenfold increase in the tonnage engaged in the trade. In the last decade alone the amount returned on some thirty thousand negroes was well over a million pounds, and not much less than a million remained when the gross value of the trade goods was deducted. The average maintenance cost of the cargo during the Middle Passage amounts to only ten shillings a head, and this leaves a balance of gain on the whole equal to—”

But he saw now that the old man had grown agitated and distressed at this parade of figures, attacking as they did his cherished plan of buying sick negroes cheaply and striving to keep them alive for the short period before abolition came. He had began plucking nervously at his clothes and hair, and after some moments he said, “I was not a member of the committee at the time, I issued no instructions to buy those pieces.”

“Which pieces are those, sir?”

“It was all a plot against me. The cloth was bought through Goddard and Fisher, they had their placemen on the purchasing committee.”

Kemp remained silent for a short while. His father-in-law was back in 1754, when some bales of cloth, of a quality inferior to the sample sent but still marked up on the price, had been sold through a company in which he had a share. “The court exonerated you, sir, as you will remember,” he said at last.

He met again the old man’s eyes, at once enraged and fearful under their disordered brows. Once more he was pierced by the irony of his present relations with this wreck of a man before him. He had never wanted to go into sugar; it had been the quickest route to wealth at a time when he was beleaguered by debts. He had wanted to take active part in a future he saw coming, build the roads and cut the canals that would transport the products of the factories and mines to where they were most needed. And now here he was, extolling the sugar trade as an antidote to madness. In his father-in-law’s plight he felt a quality, not of justice exactly, but of appropriateness. After Sir Hugo’s long and successful career of chicanery and aggrandizement, his avenging angel had arrived in the form of this demented gamble, this delusion of a race against time. The bank’s estates in Jamaica were no longer very extensive; most of the plantations had been sold, the land and the negroes on it. Little more than a sideline now, but magnified in the old man’s mind to enormous proportions, a terror of impending ruin that only desperate remedies could prevent.

Such perceptions of incongruity came frequently to Kemp now; they were unwelcome, they undermined and subverted what he thought of as the proper order of things, like the forcible intrusions of a stranger, and he entertained them only half willingly, as if they involved some betrayal of principle. Sir Hugo’s confusion was past mending, it would only get worse—he was obliged to recognize this at last. But he was aware as he quit the room that his own motions of mind were very far from possessing the order and clarity that he would have desired and thought proper.

13

Some hours later, dressed with extreme care in a suit of dark green velvet, close-fitting at the waist as fashion dictated but severe of cut otherwise, Erasmus Kemp issued from his house and engaged a sedan to take him to Westminster Bridge, where he found boats plying for hire all along the Embankment. The light was fading when he arrived at the river, but a deep stain of sunset still lingered in the sky. The hot, dry weather had continued; the air was grained with dust, giving a spreading splendor to the sunsets during these days.

The crowd by the water was jostling and noisy, with people thronging for boats and waiting in lines on the quays. Today had been a hanging day at Tyburn, one of the eight in the year. He had not