The Quality of Mercy (38 page)

“So if you were in his place you would sell out?”

“If I were in his place?” The question was misguided. How could he be in the place of someone who toiled his life away underground for a mere pittance? “I would weigh up the alternatives and choose the one most reasonable,” he said. It might be that Bordon still did not know that this was to hold on to the land and wait for the road to be built, so as to levy charges for the passage of the coal. He might have time enough yet to persuade Bordon to sell before the potential income from the wayleave became known to him. But he said nothing of this to Jane, who might think it was unfair—she was completely unversed in matters of business. It was the first time he had held something back from her regarding his plans for the mine, and he felt a certain desolation at it. “After all,” he said, “the father is no more, why should his wishes matter so much? Compared with the building of the road, I mean. We have to try to improve the world in the way that seems best to us. The road will change the whole working of the pit, in the end the whole community will benefit from it.”

He had thought to regain her sympathy with these words, knowing her belief in direct action—a belief he shared. But she was still regarding him more narrowly than he liked, with a look in her eyes he had never seen there before, a look not so much of disagreeing as of adversely judging, which was worse. She had allowed herself to get caught up in this sentimental notion of honoring the father’s wishes, against all rational arguments of self-interest. “You have a tender heart,” he said. “I am aware of it. I know the value of it.”

“Erasmus,” she said, and there was suddenly a note of patience in her voice, almost as if she were talking to someone of less than ready understanding, “you have told me of your feelings when your father died, and how you gave years and sacrificed your ambitions in order to pay the debts he left and clear his name. Was not this due to the love you bore him, the sense you had of a pact, of a vow? Did his motives and purposes not matter any longer to you because he had died?” Again she scanned his face. Surely he must see the similarity, the closeness of the connection.

“The debts were real,” he said. “Debts are not motives, they are not wishes. I did not build a shrine to my father, which is what Bordon would be doing if he made that piece of land into a garden.”

As he spoke, and during the silence that followed his words, there came to his mind a memory like a throb of pain. So many years ago now, kneeling at his bedside in the loneliness of his room in the immediate aftermath of his father’s death, he had made his vow to God and to his most cherished possession, the brace of dueling pistols hanging on the wall. He had wanted to say the words aloud, but his mouth and throat were too dry for more than a whisper.
Every penny
 …

“It is true that I made a promise to him,” he said, and Jane saw his eyes lose their fixity of expression and the line of his mouth slacken and grow softer. “I made a vow to restore his good name. But it wasn’t only the money …” He hesitated a moment, then plunged into words never before uttered to a living soul. “My
father took his own life, though we managed to get it brought in as a death due to natural causes. He hanged himself because of his losses, the disgrace of it.”

He had come to a position of attention, hands by his sides, as if only thus braced could he bring out the words. “He hanged himself in the dark,” he said. “It was I that found him hanging there. I should have known it, I should have seen it. We were together a great deal. I was not a child, I was twenty-one years of age. Someone else would have seen it. I was too much occupied with myself. We might have talked together, shared the burden. But I left him to die alone. It has always been in my mind that I left him to die alone, in the dark. I understand now, as I did not then, that it was this that I was promising to make up for, this that I was vowing to put right. I have never put it right. I paid the debts, I made money in the sugar trade and then through the bank, but I have not kept my vow.”

For some moments, deeply moved by these words and distressed at his visible suffering in pronouncing them, Jane remained silent, not sure she could trust to her voice. Then, with a conscious effort of control, she said, “You have kept it, in the only way it could be kept.” Hardly a failure at all, she thought. Only someone so dedicated to success as Erasmus could have thought it so, kept the wound open for so long. He had been young, two years younger than she herself was now, and probably not much accustomed to looking for feelings and thoughts that lay below the surface. His father would have taken care to conceal the signs of his despair; no one would advertise such an intention unless wishing to be prevented from carrying it out. “You have kept your vow,” she said again. “In what you have just said to me, in what it cost you to say it.”

He saw a look on her face that seemed like pity for him—intolerable in anyone else, sweet in her, like a balm to him, a sort of forgiveness. He could not know, as he stood there and felt the love for her gather in him, how far his confession, made to no one else, had been to ease his heart with a truth finally acknowledged,
finally released from the prison of his need to think well of himself, and how far it had been to regain Jane’s good graces, which he had feared he might be losing through her failure to understand the importance of this road through the Dene as against a few cartloads of cabbages and turnips and potatoes.

The compassion, however, the softening of her feelings, was plain to see. It was in her face and in her voice. It might be propitious for him. “Have you thought more about my proposal?” he said. “I shall have to leave for Durham again very soon. Can I hope for an answer before I go?”

“I will write to you. You will find my letter on your return.”

“Think kindly of me. You are at the center of everything I wish for. You are my guiding star.”

The barrister for the plaintiff in the Evans case, Harvey, had been joined now by a serjeant-at-law named Compton, who, while not active in the abolitionist movement, was convinced of the evils of slavery and indignant at the mistreatment of Evans. Like Harvey, he was at an early stage in his career and eager to prosecute a case that might set an important precedent. He was a tall, bony man with a prominent jaw and narrow eyes, tenacious in argument, not easily daunted.

After various delays and postponements the Lord Chief Justice had finally decided to refer the case of Jeremy Evans to the Court of King’s Bench, a decision which had surprised Ashton and given him renewed hope of a favorable outcome. A formal hearing before the King’s Bench obliged the presiding judge to give a decisive opinion. Soon after receiving news of it, he and the two lawyers came together at Compton’s chambers at Gray’s Inn to discuss matters and plan a strategy.

“He has committed himself to a definite judgment—he cannot escape it now,” Ashton said. “Perhaps he has had a change of heart.”

“That I greatly doubt,” Compton said. “Unless we are entering upon a new age of miracles. He has more than once expressed the hope that the issue of whether blacks can lawfully be returned by
force to the plantations will never finally be settled. It is an ugly matter for him. A good deal of his acquaintance benefits by the trade and will not enjoy any threat to what they regard as their rights, either in the West Indies or here in England.”

Harvey nodded. He was portly for so young a man and high-colored, with a habit of lowering his head at hostile witnesses in court and glancing up threateningly, as if about to charge them. “All the same,” he said, “I think Ashton is right, he cannot avoid a judgment. Strictly speaking, the condition of Evans is still that of a slave. He ran away from his master, he has not been manumitted. So the issue is very clear.”

“He might try to evade the issue by declaring Evans to be free,” Ashton said. “On the grounds that the condition of slavery has been interrupted, and so broken and annulled by his three years as a free man.”

“Too dangerous a precedent, considering the number of runaways in London,” Compton said. “It will suit our case better if there is no doubt of his condition. We will have him declared free by the ruling of the court, not by some convenient argument beforehand.”

“If we have any doubts as to where his lordship’s sympathies lie,” Harvey said, “we only need look at the costs he has laid on Evans.” Like the others, he had been taken aback and angered by this mark of the judge’s bias, the placing of Evans under heavy financial penalties should he fail to appear—a manifest wrong, since Evans was the plaintiff in the case, the one seeking redress for injury. “It is the defendants, this precious couple Bolton and Lyons, who should have had sureties laid upon them, but there is nothing of the sort, they have been excused all obligation. If things go against them, they can have the case withdrawn merely by relinquishing their claim to the ownership of Evans’s person.”

“They will not do so, however,” Ashton said.

“What makes you so sure? In this way they suffer no consequences. They can withdraw their claim with impunity at any time they choose. I suspect that this is what the Lord Chief
Justice hopes will be the outcome, leaving the issue comfortably unsettled.”

“You may be right in that. But I am sure they will not withdraw. They will go through with it to the end. To withdraw would be to relinquish right of ownership in Evans, and by extension all right of ownership in former slaves brought to this country who have severed the relation by taking flight. This case has been dragging on for months now, and in that time it has become a vital issue of rights. For them it is a question of fundamental principle. Evans has been purchased, to deny their rig ht in him seems to them like a violation of the laws relating to property, an aggravated form of robbery.”

This confidence was still unshaken when the day of the hearing arrived. He was confident too in the strength of their case. They had the affidavits of two persons who had witnessed the seizure of Evans, and that of the officer who had presented the writ and obtained his release from the ship, where he had been chained to the mast.

Harvey opened the case for the plaintiff before the Lord Chief Justice, who was assisted by Justices Lewis and Stewart, one on either side. He pointed out that the feudal system of serfdom, where people were attached to property, was the only precedent that could be thought applicable to slavery on British soil, though the connection was extremely remote and the practice had been extinct for several centuries.

“Where are the serfs, my lord?” he said. “Where are the inhabitants of this country who are to be regarded as chattels? Is it not the case that everyone residing in this country becomes de facto a subject of His Royal Majesty, King George? Subject to the king, my lord, not to any other person dwelling in this dear land of ours. As subject to the king, is he not therefore subject to the laws that obtain in the king’s realm? British laws, time-honored, refined by a long course of previous judgments. Not the trumped-up laws of Virginia or Jamaica. Where in our law do we find any sanctioning of the institution of slavery? Will the defense claim that
colonial legislation regarding slavery can have any force or relevance here? If they will maintain this, let them stand to the question, why should not
all
such legislation be valid here? Will they tell us where we are to draw the line?”

He was followed by Compton, who reasserted these arguments and expanded on the danger to public order if attempts were made to apply colonial practice to the laws governing land title and voting rights and matrimony and the relation between servant and master in England. “To enlarge upon this by means of example,” he said, “and to give it a more general, I venture to say universal, application, let us suppose that a gentleman from Zululand were to settle here in our midst. He is a Zulu, my lord, in his country the law permits polygamy. Would we countenance this man parading here and there and round about with a number of wives in tow, perhaps among them some of our own countrywomen reduced to concubines, on the patently absurd grounds that such is the law in Zululand?”

At this point the Chief Justice, irritated by this reference to Zulus and wearied already by what he felt to be the undue prolixity of the advocates, announced that, since the case promised to be protracted and the energy and acumen of the court would certainly be needed in high measure, he proposed to adjourn the hearing until the following Monday.

Erasmus Kemp arrived in Durham on the day after the adjournment of the Evans hearing. He found accommodation in a small town named Sedgeton some three miles from the right bank of the River Wear. The inn was not particularly comfortable, but it was conveniently close to the colliery village of Thorpe.

On the day of his arrival, in the evening, he rode over, accompanied by a stableboy from the inn, with whom he left his horse. He found the Bordon cottage and inquired for Michael. He was told by a woman he supposed to be the mother that Michael was keeping company with Elsie Foster, who lived six doors away on the same street.

It was Elsie who opened the door to him. She and Michael had been sitting together in the small parlor. Alone together, Kemp noted. This must mean that they were affianced, intending to marry. Perhaps there was an advantage to be gained from this.

He had not seen Michael Bordon since the day of the handball game, and they had exchanged no words then, as Michael had been carried off in triumph by the Thorpe men. Now he was surprised by the frankness of the young man’s regard. The blue eyes that met his own held more of curiosity than friendliness, but there was no hint of constraint, no sign of being flustered at such a visit. It was a look that made Kemp suspect that difficulties
might lie ahead. Of course, he thought, the fellow is on his home ground. The first thing was to get him detached from this, on his own, without any comforting sense of being supported or reinforced.

“I am eager to have a few words with you,” he said. “Is there somewhere we can talk alone?”