The Quality of Mercy (7 page)

He had clear intentions for this morning. He would make the rest of his appearance tally with the coat and boots, the whole to be in perfect keeping with a purse-bearing man. A more prudent person, knowing the long journey that lay ahead, might have kept his money closer about him. But Sullivan was improvident by nature, and he had spent years in the wilderness of southeast Florida, where the future was not much considered except in terms of the weather it might bring.

First he purchased, for sixpence, a canvas bag suitable for a traveling man. Since he had no other possessions at all, it would do well for his fiddle and bow. His next care was to find a barber. The one he found was also a wigmaker and made efforts to sell Sullivan a white silk wig that would have cost him more than half his store. He resisted this, however. He was proud of his hair, which was dark and luxuriant.

“I am not enterin’ in the merits of wigs as such,” he said. “I know well that they are widespread throughout the land. There will be those with a thatch that is wearin’ sparse, there will be those that are wishin’ to make themselves stand taller. But a man with a head of hair like mine would niver want to hide his light under a bushel, though willin’ to admit he is become overgrown, consequent to a neglect that there was no avoidin’.”

After the shave he had his hair trimmed, pomaded and gathered at the nape with a silk ribbon of a dark green color to go with his coat. The cost of this was tenpence, the greater part of which was due to the ribbon.

From here, the mild sunshine on his face, the effluvium from his scented hair in his nostrils, he proceeded down the street until he found a journeyman tailor sitting stitching behind the window of his shop. From the stock of ready-made clothes inside he chose worsted breeches and a good calico shirt, changing into his new clothes behind a screen in the shop.

“These I leave to your judgment,” he said, dropping his former garments on the counter. “I have some experience of commerce, an’ there is no doubt in me mind at all that you will make me an allowance for them.”

But the tailor, after the briefest of examinations, gave it as his emphatic opinion that the garments were of no value whatever. In fact, he barely touched them and seemed displeased to have them on his counter.

“That shirt an’ them trousers have been my coverin’ in good times an’ bad,” Sullivan said. “How can they have no value to them?”

For only answer the tailor pointed out that the clothes were threadbare, torn in places and stained, and moreover had been of mediocre quality even when new. The price of Sullivan’s purchases would remain unchanged at three shillings and ninepence.

“Very well, then, I will not bequeath them to you,” Sullivan said, picking up the garments and stowing them in his bag. “A man will niver prosper in this world who is lost to all sense of justice an’ decorum,” he said over his shoulder as a parting shot.

Immediately outside the shop he encountered the gap-toothed smile of a sandy-haired, thin fellow with no great air of prosperity. “I hear well that you are from Ireland,” this man said.

“I am so,” Sullivan said. “Though it is long years since I last set eyes on Galway.”

“Galway, is it? Isn’t that a happy chance now? ’Tis a Galway man I am meself.”

Often it is some slight cheating of our expectations that inclines us this way or that when dealing with our fellows. Sullivan knew he had a wealthy look about him. He was a purse-bearing man, which the other emphatically was not. In view of this, he had supposed that this fellow countryman of his, who smiled and spoke so friendly-like, would have it in mind to ask him for a small loan. He would have obliged, or so he thought afterward, highly suited as it would have been to the splendor of the morning and his new
sense of himself. He would have given the man a penny or two, together with some good wishes for his subsequent career.

But no such request was made to him. “This meetin’ has done me a power of good,” the man said. “To see a fellow Irishman risin’ in the world, it gives us hope for a future better than what is offered in the present, through no fault of me own. I hope you will be crossin’ the water again soon, an’ seein’ them you hold dear.”

Sullivan, who had been left to his own devices at the age of fourteen and had not set foot in Ireland for more than twenty years, felt some prickle of tears at this reference to home and dear ones. And when the man did not attempt to beg from him, and seemed about to move away, he reached out and took his arm. “Well,” he said, “we can take a pot of ale together before we part, for the sake of the dear old days that are no more. You are of these parts, as I suppose, so you will know of a place.”

The man showed every appearance of pleasure at this suggestion. “Murphy,” he said, holding out his hand. “Patrick Murphy.”

Sullivan was about to say his name, but then recalled that he was on the run, a fact he had been overlooking all that morning. They might be posting handbills up … “Corrigan,” he said. “Michael Corrigan.”

If the other noticed this hesitation, he did not remark on it. “I know the very place,” he said. “You look like a man that might have music in him. There is some come into the town that sings an’ plays on the drums an’ hautboys. Everywhere they go there is crowds follerin’ after. I have heard them meself, an’ they are ravishin’ on the ears. They are performin’ in a tavern nearby this very place where we are standin’. It is the innkeeper pays them, because of the people they bring in.”

“Music, is it? You are lookin’ at a man who has lived by his music in days gone by. Me fortunes have changed for the better lately, but it is a power that never quits you.”

He followed his newfound companion through narrow streets until they reached a low-fronted hostelry from which the sounds of singing carried to them as they approached. The taproom
was crowded, people were standing close together, there was no room for sitting. They had entered at the close of a song and the applause rang round them. Four men faced the audience on a raised platform. One of them, who had a drum slung across his chest, was black.

Sullivan gave his order to a man in an apron weaving through the crowd with a loaded tray. “We will do the payin’ when you do the deliverin’,” he said to the man, and then, to his companion, “I wasn’t born yesterday. There is such a thing as trustin’ our fellow man over an’ above what is reasonable. He might say he had niver had the money.”

Patrick Murphy’s reply to these words of wisdom was not audible, as at this moment there came a rattle from the drum and a sustained note from the oboe, and the group launched into song.

It was in a way unlucky for Sullivan, in these special circumstances, that it should have been a song of exile and homesickness, and that one of the singers should have been a black man. He lost for some moments all sense of his surroundings, swept by a wave of sorrow and longing, remembering the last night of the settlement, when they had gathered to celebrate the birth of Neema and Cavana’s baby. He had played like a demon that night, there had been singing and dancing, the widow Koudi had smiled at him and he had felt he would not be unwelcome in her bed. All the while, unknown to them, the redcoats were waiting above them, among the trees, waiting for dawn, for the signal to attack …

Coming back to himself, he was aware of tears in his eyes. He turned his head to say something about the beauty of the singing, but Patrick Murphy was no longer there. And the sound of the voices was strangely muted as he thrust a hand into his coat pocket and found that the purse was no longer there either.

Bordon woke shortly before daybreak, as always; it was a habit that came from the long years of rising for work, an awareness of the changes of light that came to him in sleep and roused him. He was fully awake when the calls came from the alley outside, sad-sounding, more like a lament for the night gone than a welcome to the new day. It was the turn of Hardwick and his sons to shout the hour; they had no clock but they never failed, not like some who had one. Peter Hardwick claimed that he could tell when day was coming by a change in the cries of the owls that haunted the Dene, but this was not believed by everyone.

Nan rose at the call, put on a coat and went to see to the men’s bait, tie the lids across the cans to stop the food from spilling while they walked over the fields to the pit. There was a bag for each of the three, with a leather strap to go over the shoulder; they knew which bag was theirs, but what was inside the cans they only knew when they opened them. The contents varied from day to day: bread, pasties, hard-boiled eggs, bacon, cold potatoes—she saw to it herself and used what she had in the house and what she could find amid the sparse stock of the store. With three of them working there was money enough—they were not in debt for groceries, as many were.

Bordon rose and went to the door of the other bedroom, where
his sons slept. The cottage was identical to all the others in the village, just as the yards behind were identical: three rooms, not counting the square-built chimney corner, all on one floor. He knocked and shouted, waited for an answering call and retired to the bedside to put on his pit clothes.

Percy woke at the knock, heard David muttering beside him; these two shared a bed, while Michael, as the eldest, had one of his own, a narrow pallet set against the wall. Percy tried to sleep again, turning away from the plaints of his brother, who was always slow to wake. He would stay in bed for another hour at least, not rising till it was full day, a privilege he tried to make the most of, knowing it would not last much longer now. Soon he would be going down with the others, a thing desired and dreaded in equal measure.

This morning sleep did not return to him, something increasingly frequent of late. He was afraid of the mine because he knew it was a testing ground; you had to go down before you could become a man. The sound of clanking and hissing came over the fields to him, as if issuing from some monster under the ground clamoring for victims. The fear was not lessened by the return home each day of his father and brothers, because they were bigger and stronger and had stood the test, but perhaps not everybody did. He had a very close friend called Billy Scotland, who was the same age as himself, and he had often wondered if Billy too was troubled by these doubts. But he could not ask because he knew that Billy would deny it, and by asking he would have revealed himself as fainthearted. Recently it had occurred to him that Billy might be keeping quiet for the same reason.

While he lay there, prey to these thoughts, some seventy men and boys set off in the half-dark, walking in loose groups across the pasture fields that led to the eye of the pit. Michael watched for the light, as he did always; it was the only natural light that he would see that day. The sea still slept in the distance, shrouded in darkness. But there was light enough now for him to make out the tufts of sheep’s wool caught in the fences, a soft clogging
of the wire, no definite shape to it, only a sort of softness. There were catkins on the hazel trees; he could not distinguish the color, but he could see how the foliage was thickened by them. Colors came out now, as the light slowly strengthened, tints of dawn that would be lost in the full light of day; he made out the reddish gleam on the trunks of the birch trees higher up, at the edges of the fields, a color that had seemed menacing to him as a small child, making him always feel relieved when he had got past.

Deeply familiar things, but they had never grown stale for him. From the age of seven he had walked through these fields in all seasons and weathers, walking behind his father, as he did now, as his father had done at that age, and all the fathers before him that Michael could imagine. From open-cut to shaft, they had been hacking out the coal here for a longer time than anyone could reckon. There was nothing but the mining, no other work for the men. The village of Thorpe was there because of the coal, and for no other reason in the world.

He could distinguish his father’s back now, among the others, in the forward group of twenty or so. He found himself wondering if his father took notice of these changes in the light, these small signs of the changing season. Such things were too intimate to talk about. He sensed the wound of loss in his father, the rage in him, knew of the long-held desire to possess the plot of land by the streamside in the Dene. This had never been openly confessed, but his father had talked of the acreage, the sheltered position, the ease of irrigation. Practical things—it was the nearest he could come to unburdening himself. It was no more than a dream, in any case. He could never hope to buy the land, it would never be offered for sale, he would never have the money. But a dream nursed so stubbornly, over so long, becomes something more.

There was no real hope of saving. There were the three of them, soon to be joined by Percy, who would bring in an extra sixpence a day for the first five years, more after that, maybe double, when he rose to be putter’s lad, as David was now. In four or five years David could hope to be promoted to headsman, taking two-thirds
of the earnings of the sledge loads. He himself was twenty-one now; he looked forward to becoming a full pitman, a hewer like his father, with fifteen shillings a week. But the family would lose his wages when he married. There was a girl he liked, Elsie Foster, who lived six doors away from them, though he hadn’t yet taken the decisive step of asking her to walk out with him. He was hoping to see her now, though it would be only briefly, before he went down; she started work at the same time he did, sorting out the waste from the coal at the head of the shaft.

There was enough money, they could hold their heads up, they need be beholden to no one. There was even enough for him, with his father’s permission, to take three hours a week in addition to Sunday, to practice at handball. He was recognized as having a talent for the game, and would be the Thorpe champion in the annual match with the nearby colliery village of Northfield, due to take place fairly soon now.