The Quality of Mercy

4



Jane regarded her brother with the expression she reserved for his accounts of his doings: solicitous, affectionate, marked by a slight pretense of disbelief. She was the younger by twelve years—they were the only two that had survived childhood—and she admired his earnestness of purpose, though sometimes, when this became relentless, she grew impatient at it and in a way rebellious.

“You look tired,” she said. “Would you like more tea?” He was not a robust man, and the calls he made on himself taxed him sometimes beyond his strength.

Ashton held out his cup to be replenished. “I have been rushing to and fro like a madman all day.”

“Did you manage to save the man?”

The question concerned a negro from the Gold Coast who went by the name of Jeremy Evans. After residing quietly in Chelsea for three years gaining a living as a porter, he had been seen and recognized by his former owner, who had brought him from the sugar fields of Barbados and from whom he had run away once on British soil. On this man’s orders Evans had been kidnapped the previous evening, tied and gagged, carried to Gravesend and rowed out to a ship bound for Jamaica, to be sold as a slave on arrival.

“It turned out that the captain was in the plot,” Ashton said. “I think it probable that he was promised a commission on the sale. As you know, we had obtained from the Rotation Office a warrant for Evans’s release and had it sent to Gravesend, where the ship was lying. But it came to me that with the ship cleared and ready to sail, the captain might refuse to obey the summons, or pretend he never received it, which in fact was what he did.” Ashton paused to sip some of his tea. “This is doing me a power of good,” he said, smiling at his sister.

Jane kept house for him and made sure the servants performed their duties, just as she tried to make sure she performed her own. She was capable of considerable severity with them, as with herself, at any scanting or neglect. It was a lesson learned from her mother—both parents were dead now. She knew how her brother liked his tea and took care to see it was made as it should be. He was ascetic in his tastes; it was rarely that he touched alcohol in any form.

“I knew that the only thing he would take notice of was a writ of habeas corpus,” he said. “I had to go first to the Lord Mayor and then to Justice Winslow, and spend time waiting, before I could obtain the writ. Then it had to be served on the captain aboard his ship. We were lucky. Two hours more and she would have been setting sail.”

“Mr. Evans was the lucky one,” she said. “He will have cause to remember you.” Others too, she thought. For a good number of years now Frederick had given all his energy, and spent much of his private fortune, in contesting the right of property in other human beings, particularly when attempts were made to assert this right in England. It had been revulsion at a brutal case of reenslavement that had brought him to embrace this cause, and so changed his life. Stronger than revulsion had been shame and a sort of remorse that such things could happen on English soil, that they could be condoned, a young negro brought here, kept imprisoned, beaten and starved, turned out into the street when he was thought to be dying, restored to health free of charge by a doctor who took pity on him, recognized by his former master, seized and shipped to the West Indies to be resold. The charity of the doctor, a Scotsman named Andrews, had been a main element in Ashton’s conversion; he had visited the man and the two had become friends, and associates in the cause of abolition.

“So the captain released him without compulsion?” Jane said.

“Yes, he had no choice. He was furious, of course, and violently abusive, but he did not dare to ignore the writ.”

“You are pleased, then, with the outcome?”

Ashton paused on this with a certain caution. He was at the opposite pole to the politician, who leaps to claim credit for any success, however slight or incidental. All the passion of his nature was fixed on achieving a success that would be not partial but complete, that would put an end to this iniquitous traffic in human beings. And he feared in his darker moments that his limited means and small political influence made such success unlikely in his lifetime. When he answered now, it was with a sort of reserve habitual to him. “The officer who served the writ says that he saw the poor fellow chained to the mast in a flood of tears. He was weeping still when they rowed him to the shore, but now it was for joy.”

“So then we should call that a success, surely?”

Ashton was pleased to hear her including herself in Evans’s rescue. He sometimes worried that his sister did not have sufficiently deep convictions. She almost never expressed large or general sentiments of a moral kind, or seemed interested in the broader movements of reform. She was active in charity and good works, especially where the homeless and destitute were concerned, but her zeal was limited, in Frederick’s view at least; it lay all in a rage for immediate betterment, for practical measures that might help people to help themselves.

Unlike myself in this, he had often thought, as in other ways. She took little active part in the movement for abolition, though sometimes trying to persuade those among her acquaintance who professed sympathy to contribute to the costs of legal process and of lodging runaway negroes in safe houses pending the hearings. Mainly the sympathy was more expressed in drawing-room rhetoric than in any alacrity to part with money, as she had remarked to her brother with an assumption of lightness, almost of carelessness, in the irony, frequent with her though in him completely lacking. He did not understand it, this habit of raillery, of assumed indifference, except to think that at twenty-three years of age she had not so far been softened by love. There had been suitors, but none had been acceptable to her. He himself was unmarried and thought it likely he would remain so.

He looked at her now for some moments without speaking. Her temperament was happier than his, he knew. She was very vividly present in this plainly furnished sitting room, in her dress of blue silk with hoop skirt cut to reveal the frill of petticoats and the white silk stockings and the pale blue satin slippers. Like him, she was Methodist in religion from earliest upbringing, and in her way she was devout; but she was pretty, more than pretty, and her figure was good, facts of which she was fully conscious; she was as fond of clothes and as observant of fashion as any young woman of spirit—and means—might be expected to be.

“Well, as to success,” Ashton said at last, “that is a very relative matter, Jane. We have rescued him from being reenslaved, so much is true—or at least we have given him a respite. He is in safe keeping at present. No doubt Bolton will post up a bill offering a reward to any who find and return him.”

“Bolton?”

“His former owner. Open the London Gazette any day of the week and you will find several notices of the kind. We seek to uphold the law on behalf of black people held against their will or made captive when there is no charge against them, because that is the law of this country and should apply to all, whatever the color or the degree. And we can obtain release if there is clear illegality, and if we act in time.”

“But that says a great deal for the fairness of our laws, does it not?”

“Oh, a great deal,” he said, and the force of the sarcasm brought a sudden light into his eyes, always clear in their gaze and very striking in the narrow, delicately boned face, at present drawn with lines of weariness and strain. “And so the injustice can go on forever, while we proudly contemplate the perfect justice of our laws.”

Jane felt the beginnings of a familiar exasperation at her brother’s unyieldingness, his refusal of comfort. “But you said yourself that the laws are applied.”

“Most cases do not come to our notice at all. For every one saved there are a dozen taken by force from these shores to be sold in the West Indies or our American colonies, and worked to death there. And those who remain here are caught in the contradictions of the law. Let us imagine that we are at this moment attending a hearing on a plaint of unlawful detention of a black man or woman. The case goes our way, we succeed in obtaining release. Full of jubilation, we leave the courtroom, step round the corner and find a black child of seven or eight being sold at auction in a coffeehouse.”

His voice, relating this, had fallen into a rhetorical mode, as if he were addressing more persons than one, the result of a feeling of isolation that descended on him, even with this sister whom he held in deep affection, a sense of the appalling obviousness of what he was saying, this overwhelming truth, which was not, however, by some ugly paradox, immediately plain to others.

“Yes,” he said, “you can apply to a justice and he will grant you a writ. But no court in this land, in this England of ours, where we are so proud of the pure air of liberty, no court and no judge will take the essential step of denying the right of property in black people brought here from our colonies abroad. We have tried again and again to bring a case that will force the issue, and we have always failed. They do not dare to set a precedent that might bring the right of ownership into question. Liberty is sacred, of course, but only when it favors the slave owner.”

He was silent for a moment or two and then said, with a sort of solemn indignation, “And now it seems I am to be sued by this Bolton on the grounds that by my intervention I have deprived him of a capital sum, namely the current value of a male slave in good condition at the Kingston slave market, where it was purposed to sell him.” Ashton shook his head. “It is lunacy,” he said. “A writ is served on a man for violent and flagrant disregard of the laws relating to the liberty of the subject, release of the abused person is secured and then you find yourself being sued for his value as a slave.”

Something divided in his expression, some mixture of incredulity and ruefulness, struck her now as comical, and she laughed a little, at which he was visibly surprised for a moment. Then he smiled himself and nodded. “Yes,” he said, “you are right, it is ludicrous.”

“You should laugh more, Frederick,” she said. “And you should divert yourself more. It does not mean that one cares less. And this is especially so now, with this case of the slave ship that has come before you, that one hears talk of all over town.”

“No wonder there is talk. It is a most unusual case. In fact, I can’t remember anything like it. Not only for the circumstances, but for the appalling wickedness of the crime—those unoffending people, our fellow human beings, bound and cast overboard to drown, and all to save a few guineas. However, we may derive benefit from it.”

“Derive benefit?” She had never grown used to her brother’s sudden changes from near to far in the way he viewed things. There were times, as now, when she felt a peculiar chill, a sense of dismay, at his ability to pass in a breath from compassion genuinely felt to considerations of strategy, to what might be turned to account.

“The case has received widespread attention,” he said. “It has featured much in the newspapers—people are talking about it, and not only in London. It will give us an opportunity to bring the iniquities of the trade to public notice. There are two actions, entirely separate in law but closely bound together, both brought by the owner of the ship, a man who has made a fortune out of sugar—out of the slave trade, in other words.”

“Yes,” Jane said. “Erasmus Kemp. We have met.”

“Have you indeed? I did not know that.”

“It was at the house of Sir Richard Sykes, in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It seems that he and Mr. Kemp have some banking interest in common. As you know, his daughter Anne is a particular friend of mine.”

“You said nothing of this.”

“There was really nothing to say. Just a few minutes of conversation, quite unmemorable, with several others present.”

Jane had busied herself as she spoke with setting the tea things back on the tray, an operation she would normally have left to the parlormaid. She was aware of not being entirely frank, but saw no reason why she should be, or why she should be uneasy at not being. Distinctly memorable, in fact, had been Erasmus Kemp’s glowering good looks and elegant figure, his lack of smiling, the blaze of his regard, as if he were aiming his eyes at people. She had sensed a sort of unhappiness in him, fiercely contained. His face had lightened a little when he complimented her on her gown, but still he had not smiled.

After waiting in vain for something further from her, Ashton said, “All this happened something like fourteen years ago, and now there is no ship, very few survivors and no reliable witness.”

She was about to ask him more when a footman entered to announce a gentleman visitor, a Mr. Van Dillen, who was asking if he might be accorded some minutes of Mr. Ashton’s time.

“Show him into my study and ask him to take a seat,” Ashton said, getting to his feet. “Tell him I shall be with him in a minute or two. This is one of the underwriters,” he said to his sister, after glancing at the card the servant had handed him.

Jane too had risen. “I have some things to see to,” she said. “I look forward to hearing your account of the visit.”

As they stood together in the light from the wide bow windows, the resemblance between brother and sister was evident. There was the same delicacy of feature and clear gaze, the same fine dark brown hair, though Jane’s had tints of copper that her brother’s lacked, the same straight-shouldered, narrow-boned build. The brother’s face was grimmer, beyond what could be accounted for by the difference in age, drawn with some expression of endurance or obstinacy, as if the suffering caused him by contemplating the suffering of others had forced him to call on reserves of resistance, taken from him the commoner sort of kindness.

“What will you do?” she asked, as they moved together toward the door. “About Mr. Evans, I mean.”

He held the door open for her, keeping it wide to allow the unhindered passage of the skirts. “What I shall do,” he said eagerly, “is bring immediate proceedings for criminal assault on his behalf against Bolton, who ordered it, and the men who seized him and conveyed him to the ship, and the ship’s captain who had him chained to the mast.”

She smiled at him as she passed through. “Dear brother,” she said, “you will drown in litigation one of these days if you are not careful.”

He remained in the room for some minutes after she had gone, as if at a loss, momentarily disabled. These moments of arrest came sometimes to him, times at which his purposes seemed suspended, hoisted away from him, and he was recalled to his former life, genteel and pointless—the debating society, the coffeehouse, the written verses of slight value circulated among friends …

He glanced up suddenly, as if to break free. Yes, he would bring criminal charges against them. He had never before initiated criminal proceedings by a black man against a white. The Grand Jury might throw out the indictment. But it was only by testing the ground that any way forward could be found. Tirelessly, in spite of all disappointment, he persisted in the belief that a judgment would someday be delivered that would open men’s eyes, call the entire system into question. If Evans’s case went as far as the Court of King’s Bench, substantial costs were only to be expected …

The maid came in to take away the tea things, and with this Ashton recalled suddenly that he was awaited in his study and began to make his way there.

The man who rose at his entrance was middle-aged and corpulent, plainly dressed in frock coat and double-breasted waistcoat and wearing the raised wig with double roll common to men of business. “Good of you to give me your time, sir,” he said as they shook hands. “I am much obliged. Van Dillen at your service.” He spoke with a slight foreign accent.

“Pray be seated. You represent the insurers, I believe.”

“That is so, sir. You have been giving the case some attention, as I understand.”

Ashton’s first impulse was to ask the other how he had come by this understanding. But he forbore—it would be common knowledge by this time, at least in the circles frequented by his visitor. “Naturally, yes,” he said. “It has some unusual features, would you not agree?”

Van Dillen raised a plump, short-fingered hand and briefly caressed his chin. “Unusual features, yes, one could say that. You will know that an action has been brought against the underwriters to recover a percentage of the value of sixty-eight male slaves and seventeen females lost in the passage from the Coast of Guinea to the West Indies in the year 1753.”

“I did not know the numbers. What is your warranty for those?”

“The first mate of the ship, James Barton, has made a deposition to that effect and will repeat his testimony in court, if so required. Other members of the crew may be called upon to testify, since it is a question of fact and does not involve them in any criminal charges. Barton has said that they cast the negroes overboard while the breath of life was still in them. This they did on the orders of the captain, which orders, as he declares, were sufficient authority. He has been freed on the surety of the present owner, son of the former owner, by name Erasmus Kemp. His whereabouts have been kept secret to prevent him from being got at.”

Some snap of resentment in the tone of these last words told Ashton that efforts to get at the mate had already been made, without success. “Well,” he said, “if we can bring him before the court, we may get at him there.”

“You say ‘we,’ sir. I am delighted to hear you say it. It is in the hope that you will support our case that I have taken the liberty of calling on you at your home. They claim there was a shortage of water aboard the ship. It is our belief, and we will found our case on it, that this is gross falsehood, that these slaves were cast overboard because they were sick and like to die before reaching Jamaica, and that this was done in the full knowledge that death aboard ship, when due to natural causes, is not covered by our policies.”

Ashton passed a hand over his brow. “Natural causes, is it? Heaven help us. I have not yet understood how I can be of service to you.”

“You can speak for us. You are a man known for your opposition to slavery, known as a generous patron and protector of black people. Who more fitted than you to make an appeal to the court and express on the behalf of the underwriters the sincere indignation and moral outrage we feel at the barbarism of this claim? Thirty guineas a head for the men, twenty-three for the women—that is what the owner is claiming. We will dispute the estimates of value, but if they are taken as correct, it will amount to upward of twenty-five hundred pounds, taking the men and women together.”

“I see, yes,” Ashton said. “You want me to sound the note of humanity so as to help you avoid meeting the claim.”

“I would not put it like that, sir.”

“No, I dare say not. Well, we shall not quarrel over words. Perhaps we can come to an accord. We for our part will seek to have the cases heard together in the same court. The charges Kemp is bringing against the crew, or what remains of them, are murder and piracy—murder of the captain, not the negroes. Since the ship was at sea, the case comes under the jurisdiction of the Admiralty, but this will make no difference in practice, as it will be heard at the Old Bailey just the same, with two, or possibly three, Admiralty commissioners sitting in judgment. If you will raise your voice with ours in a common plea and argue with us that one set of human beings cannot, in law, have such power over another, that this was mass murder whatever the quantity of water, we may both be victorious. You will avoid payment, and we may obtain a ruling that denies the right of property of one man in another.”

He had leaned forward in the enthusiasm of these words, but Van Dillen remained silent and motionless for several moments, avoiding his eye. “No, sir,” he said at last. “No, it will not do. We will press for the hearing to be held at the Guildhall, as is usual in such claims. We cannot confuse the two cases, we cannot hazard the firm’s money on an issue of property. It would only lead to muddle, sir. No, we must confine our arguments to the question of jettison, whether these negroes were cast over the side for some just cause or not.”

“Some just cause?” Ashton rose to his feet, obliging his visitor to do the same. “I should have known better,” he said. “I will not take up any more of your time. Be assured that whatever words are uttered on our side in court, they will not be designed to save your guineas.”