The Quality of Mercy (16 page)

Miss Sheridan quit the stage to renewed applause, and Spenton conducted her back to the box. In spite of his nonchalant manner, he had planned the evening with considerable care, or so it seemed to Kemp. The timing was impeccable. As soon as everyone was again seated, while Miss Sheridan was still smiling at the compliments being showered on her, two attendants, they too in the livery of the gardens, began to mount with supper trays. There was fricassee of quail, the slices stewed in wine and butter, and a good quantity of the legendary Spring Gardens ham, the
slices so thin that it was said you could read a newspaper through one, though no one at the table claimed to have tried this. Champagne and claret accompanied the meats, and there were custards, tarts and cheesecakes to follow.

Kemp could not forbear making further calculations while he ate. There must be at least twenty-five guests, he thought, taking all three boxes together. The price normally charged here for a bottle of French claret was five shillings, already far from cheap; ordered up thus for the occasion, it would cost considerably more. Then there was the champagne, then there was the food, then there were the musicians to pay, and the waiters. This was a man in straitened circumstances! The thought came charged with feelings of resentment; Spenton was heedless of expense because he had been born to money, whereas he himself had had to fight and scrape and resort to questionable methods in his pursuit of it.

After supper Spenton suggested a stroll, and this was generally agreed upon. Emerging from the arcade, Kemp saw that there were men engaged in dismantling the orchestra platform, confirming his suspicion that it had been erected there solely for Miss Sheridan’s benefit. Spenton took his arm, and together they turned into the first of the graveled walks that led off from the central avenue. This extended some hundreds of yards and ended in a series of triumphal arches. Beyond there was a further vista, what appeared to be a ruined Roman temple with Corinthian columns, a recent addition to the gardens that Kemp had heard spoken of but was seeing now for the first time: not a building at all, but a triumph of illusion—a trompe l’oeil painting on a huge scale. The walk turned off from this at right angles, leading past a small Chinese pavilion and a statue of Handel playing a lyre in the character of Orpheus. At this point they heard the ringing of a bell not very far away.

“That is the bell for the water show,” Spenton said. “I always make a point of seeing it when I am in the gardens. I am having some hydraulic features installed in the grounds of Wingfield, my
house in Durham, and so it is of particular interest. Would you care to give it a glance?”

Kemp assented, though somewhat taken by surprise; he had been expecting his companion to broach the subject of the loan, not this one of waterworks. Spenton was obviously a man who dallied and delayed—or perhaps merely affected to. But he was in need of a loan, they would come to it; otherwise they would not be walking here together.

There was a gated turnstile at the entrance to the show, and another liveried attendant there to take the money. It was considerably more expensive than the general charge for entry to the gardens, half a guinea a head. Spenton insisted on paying for them both. “Come this way,” he said. “The figure with which they begin is particularly impressive.”

They were in time to see the figure of Death, a skeleton with an hourglass, slowly rising from the surface of an oval pool and pointing with his dart at a pillar on which the hours were marked. He had a lamp inside him, lighting up his skull, and his progress upward was menacing and slow.

“He is standing on a board with a hole in it,” Spenton said. “The dropping of the water out of the cock and through the hole in the board makes him rise up little by little. Ingenious, ain’t it? When he is clear of the water, he will strike with his dart at the pillar, and it is this that releases the clockwork and starts up the show. I am presently constructing something similar in the grounds of my house.”

There was no sound of a blow, but the movement of the dart was swift when it came, and the effect was immediate. The pillar was only one of several; all were brilliantly lit up now, and the water came out in a sheer flow, breaking into forms of dragons and swans and fish. At the top of the structure there was Neptune riding a whale, out of whose nostrils the water glittered and jetted through small openings.

“Ingenious, ain’t it?” Spenton said again. “You see the figures
but not the devices that set the whole thing going. There are cisterns behind the pillars, a three-level frame, pumps, jacks, weights, springs, piping, a whole mechanical world. You don’t see them, they are concealed by the brightness of the light.”

He had spoken with a liveliness of interest quite at odds with his usual nonchalance of manner. Turning toward him, Kemp saw his face full in the light and was again aware of that strange mixture of delicacy and brutality in it. At this moment Spenton, still gazing raptly at the endless forming and dissolving of the images, said, “I believe your bank is prepared to advance me a loan.”

It was not in such garish light, nor with before him an image of Hercules drawing a bow at a hissing, water-jetting dragon, that Kemp had envisaged conducting the discussion now finally arrived at, but he took the opportunity that was presented and set out as clearly as he could what the bank was prepared to offer. Spenton’s request would be granted—he was asking for a loan of five thousand pounds; he would be given five years to repay the money, and no interest would be charged. These terms were conditional upon the bank being granted a twenty-year lease on Spenton’s mine at a cost to the lessee of a thousand pounds a year, payable annually in advance. The bank would be responsible for the running of the mine, and the profits on the coal would go to the bank.

“Yes, yes, I see,” Spenton said. “We should return now, I think. The best of the show is over.”

Hercules had now been replaced by a fiery bird revolving on an axle. They turned away from the light and began to go back the way they had come. For some minutes they walked side by side without speaking. Kemp was beginning to think that the offer had not pleased Spenton. More favorable terms than this the bank could not offer.

They turned onto the avenue known as the Grove, where the lights were sparser and the shadows longer, designed for the use of those who might wish for a more solitary and meditative promenading. Quite suddenly Spenton said, “Well, I find it a generous
offer on the bank’s part, and I am quite ready to accept it. If you would be kind enough to give me some of your time and visit me the day after tomorrow, in the morning, we will have the agreement drawn up in the presence of my attorney. Then I hope you will come up to Durham as my guest and have a look round. I am intending to go up there next week. I have to talk to my tenants, and there is the annual handball match with the neighboring colliery village—I never miss that. We have a particularly promising champion this year, I am told.”

The casualness of this acceptance, coming after the silence and mixed as it was with talk of tenants and handball, struck Kemp as extraordinary, so different was it from his own style when anything concerning money was being talked about. Unexpected too the wave of relief and jubilation he experienced at hearing the words—he had not altogether realized how much his heart had been set on obtaining the lease.

He was looking toward the river as they walked. From the darkness that lay over the water a fiery bolt of light rose into the sky and burst there, descending in a golden shower. Where have I read or been told about a shower of gold falling on a girl? he wondered. A naked girl … The rocket was followed by another, then another. The bright shower of their descent filled the sky. Of course, it was a hanging day; there were always fireworks on hanging days in the spring and summer months.

At some prompting that he was afterward to think of as not due to chance alone, he turned to look toward the line of trees bordering the avenue. The glow of gold lay on the foliage of those more distant. He saw a group of people pass through this zone of radiance. One of them was a young woman, who raised her face to the sky just as a rocket burst and a shower of gold began to descend. In these few moments, as the red turned to gold, her face was lit up, and it was the face of Jane Ashton.

The day had begun badly for Ashton, and things did not improve in the course of it. Stanton came to see him in the morning with the news that Evans, the negro they had rescued at Gravesend hours before he was due to be forcibly transported to the West Indies, had disappeared from the house where they had been keeping him out of harm’s way until his case could be heard.

“He is gone without trace,” Stanton said. “He must have been inveigled out somehow, perhaps on some false summons from us, then seized and carried off. He was aware of the danger to him, he knew by experience what these men are capable of for the sake of the fifty guineas they claim he is worth. It is a tidy sum, after all. No, it is unlikely that he left the house of his own free will. And if he did, why has he not returned?”

“But how could they have known where he was?”

“It is possible that the man who had Evans in his care, whom we have been paying to keep him safe, saw a chance of some more immediate profit. No doubt they would be ready to offer a reward, perhaps two guineas or so.”

“Townsend? No, I am unwilling to believe that. He has been providing this service for years—there have been others before Evans. Why should he betray us now?”

Stanton smiled at these words and shook his head. “You are
always ready to take things on trust, Frederick, and it does you credit. But it is not a habit of mind we can afford to cultivate when we have to question witnesses in a court of law. Under certain circumstances loyalty can wear thin. Townsend may have had losses we know nothing of, he may have had expenses we know nothing of.”

“I cannot believe it. I think it more likely that Evans was followed to the house. Those two, the slave-takers, as they call themselves—and why not, since it is their trade?—the two that seized Evans and bound him and carried him to the ship, whom I was intending to sue for assault and abduction along with the ship’s captain, they have not been found, they have not been named. They were nowhere to be seen when the writ was presented to the captain. I think they may have waited, unobserved, and followed us when we accompanied Evans to Townsend’s house.”

“It is possible, yes,” Stanton said. “Then they would offer the information, at a price, to those two gentlemen who are claiming damages from us, who would allow some time for things to settle down and vigilance to be relaxed, meanwhile spying on the house, waiting for a moment when there was no one else about.”

Ashton nodded. “However it happened, we have lost him,” he said. It was bad news indeed. Evans would be held in captivity somewhere. London contained numerous prisons of one sort or another, many of them disguised as private houses; people could be kept in confinement indefinitely at small cost. “There is nothing we can do for the moment,” he said. “Merely his disappearance gives us no grounds for action. Without a definite knowledge of his whereabouts, we cannot lodge a complaint on his behalf. It would be answered that he might have simply run away. I am sorry for the poor fellow—he has done no wrong and he is being made to suffer.”

“We must hope for the best,” Stanton said, and on this he took his leave, somewhat disappointed to have had no sight of Jane Ashton. She was out on a visit of charity, Frederick had said.

Ashton remained in his study, sunk in gloomy thoughts. This
new violence done to Evans had brought about one of the lapses into depression to which he was prone. There had been so many disappointments, so many setbacks. The odds were too great; the forces of avarice and cruelty would carry the day, as they had done for all the centuries of man’s habitation on earth.

His mood was not lightened when in early afternoon he received a note from the judge appointed to hear the insurance claim on the jettisoned slaves. After due consideration, Mr. Justice Blundell had found it more in keeping with the dictates of due process to have this civil case heard separately at the Guildhall at a date yet to be determined; the criminal charges would more appropriately be heard later, before the King’s Bench. He had therefore decided not to refer the matter to the Lord Chief Justice, a decision which lay within his powers.

Nowhere contained in this carefully worded document was there any hint of Blundell’s private awareness that to trouble the Lord Chief Justice with such a request could seriously impede his own further career and might well put an end to his hopes of a title. In fact, it had not taken him long to make up his mind; the delay in communicating his decision had been merely to lend an impression of weight and deliberation. He knew the public interest this case had aroused and he knew Ashton by repute, knew him for a troublesome fellow who was set on disturbing the social order. But he had not had any direct dealings with him before, and the petition he had been sent, eloquently urging that the two cases should be tried together, had given him a glimpse of nightmare, a vision of the bottomless pit—this also, of course, not hinted at in his reply. In particular, the improper use of Holy Writ had troubled him. The words taken by Ashton from the Book of Job had gone on echoing in his mind.
What then shall I do when God riseth up? And when He visiteth, what shall I answer Him? Did not He that made me in the womb make him?

His appetite had been affected for two days running. Instead of presiding over a case of insurance liability, he was being asked to request the senior judge of the land to transform this simple
matter into a formal and explicit deliberation as to whether the negroes thrown overboard were to be regarded as something more than goods, an issue to be left to the judgment of a dunderheaded jury, unpredictable and given to crude sentiment. Who could tell what the outcome might be?

He had refreshed his memory by referring to the definition of piracy delivered in the case of
Rex v. Dawson
of 1696: “Piracy is only the sea term for robbery within the jurisdiction of the Admiralty … If the mariner of any ship shall violently dispossess the master and afterwards carry away the ship itself or any of the goods with a felonious intention in any place where the Lord Admiral hath jurisdiction, this is robbery and piracy …”