The Quality of Mercy

7



“I had hoped the business might be settled privately between us,” Van Dillen said. “The outcome must be doubtful in law, and if we go to the extent of a hearing there are costs to be thought of. Why should we fatten the lawyers, Mr. Kemp?”

He was not finding the interview easy. He was physically uncomfortable, for one thing; the seat of his chair was too small for a man of his bulk, and the weather was unseasonably hot. The room had only one window, and the morning sun, strong despite the clogging air of London, slanted through it and lay directly on him. He felt overheated in his bob wig and broadcloth suit.

He was at the further disadvantage of being a petitioner, of having solicited this meeting. Some men are dressed in authority wherever they go, but the broker was not of these; he was accustomed to wielding what he had of it in the domestic surroundings of his home in Richmond, his modest premises off the Strand, or free and unbuttoned in his booth at Lloyd’s Coffee House, where most of his day-to-day business was done. This present ground belonged to a man not only younger but very much richer. A wealth not much expressed in display, however, he had noted: plain oak paneling, shelves for ledgers and almanacs, ladder-back chairs.

“We are in high summer before we have had spring,” he said, in the face of the other’s continuing silence. He felt an itch at the side of his neck, some insect crawling there. Conditions, however uncomfortable, will generally be favorable to life of some sort, and the windless days and early heat had produced a plague of small black beetles that flew about blindly, getting tangled in wigs and snared in the corners of eyes, copulating and dying, leaving a scurf of corpses.

The broker took out a handkerchief and dabbed at his neck, turning his head in a way too affectedly elegant, or so Kemp thought, for an honest man. Too many Dutchmen in shipping and insurance these days, too many brokers altogether. He had never had the smallest fellow feeling for opponents; the knowledge of conflicting interests fed an appetite for enmity always keen. “To my mind,” he said, “there is no doubt of the outcome in law, none at all.”

“How? After close on fourteen years and most of the actors in it dead?” Van Dillen looked with affected surprise and genuine curiosity at the man before him. It was not so much the certainty of tone; the broker had much experience of disputed claims, and litigants always professed—at least publicly—an unshakable faith in the justice of their cause. But this man had an air of conviction that came close to ferocity—his eyes blazed with it. A vivid face, not very English, some suggestion of the south in it. From Liverpool, the family, a melting pot of peoples and races …

There was again a silence between them that lasted for some moments. In one corner of the window a fly tumbled and buzzed, caught in some hopeless mania of escape. The din of metal wheels on the cobbles of Cheapside came to them here, but distantly; Kemp’s place of business looked out over the quiet courts south of St. Paul’s. There was the occasional scrape of a stool from the adjacent room, where three clerks worked side by side at a long counter. “What are fourteen years, or forty, if it comes to that?” Kemp said. “What point are you seeking to make? Time can make no smallest difference to the justice of my claims, mine or any other man’s.”

“That is all very fine, sir,” the broker said. “Impeccable sentiments, egad, they do you credit. If you but had the trying of the case yourself, there could be very little doubt of the verdict. But it is far from certain whether the judge will take the same view.”

He had spoken tartly, provoked at last by the arrogant certainty of the other’s tone. Now he saw Kemp relax a little from the braced position he had assumed in the high-backed chair, and he wondered for a moment if the way to get the fellow on terms less stiff was to quarrel with him. The broker was an observant man, and shrewd in his way. There was some absence in the other’s face, a kind of blankness, in spite of the fierce regard. This was a man who believed so strongly in his own purposes as to appear stricken by them, afflicted—and he answered this affliction with rage. “In a case of this kind,” the broker said, “at such an interval of time and with such flawed and partial testimony, no one can predict the outcome.”

He saw the other pick up a ruler and strike down at the desk with it. “Filthy little creatures,” Kemp said. “How do they get in? The window can’t be opened.”

“What can be predicted are the legal costs,” Van Dillen said.

“My good sir, the facts are not in dispute, at least as regards the central fact of the negroes being cast overboard and the necessity thereof.”

“It is precisely the necessity of it that the insurers will dispute if it comes before a court.”

“There was a shortage of water. Lawful jettison is one of the hazards covered by the underwriters. You guaranteed the policy with my father in 1752, through his agent in Liverpool, where the ship was built and fitted out.”

“Not I,” Van Dillen said. “I inherited the policy on the death of my uncle, when I became one of the partners. I would never have signed an agreement on a per capita basis at a fixed rate. No firm that I know of would insure against loss of cargo at more than twenty percent of the current market value.”

“Well, sir, like it or not, the insurers accepted the risk at that time to the extent of thirty guineas per head for the men and twenty-three for the women. Come, it is not so unreasonable. In the summer of 1753, when these negroes were cast overboard with just cause, a male slave would have fetched forty-five guineas in Jamaica, whither the ship was bound, and a female thirty-three or -four. The numbers are not in dispute. There were eyewitnesses, some of them still alive.”

“They will be the surviving members of the crew, no doubt, presently lying in Newgate Prison, men who will be facing charges of murder and piracy once this insurance claim has been settled. Fine witnesses, sir.”

“There is also the chief officer, Barton. He will testify to the numbers and to the shortage of water.”

“The mate on a slave ship, we know what that is. And freed on your surety. Neither judge nor jury will take him to their bosoms. And then, memory plays us false, all men of ordinary judgment recognize that. It was a desperate action—ship and crew were in a grievous state at the time. It is no use whatever to talk about the value of the cargo, as we both know full well. A Corymantee black, for instance, will fetch more than an Ibo, as being more robust and less likely to cut his throat or decline into melancholy and so die.”

Van Dillen smiled and nodded and sat back as far as he was able, smoothing down the white cotton waistcoat over his ample paunch. “Sir, latitude of thought, the ability to make distinctions, is a main mark of civilized man. I know the Guinea trade, sir, we do a great deal of business in that line.”

“I do not doubt it.” These last remarks had confirmed Kemp in his dislike of the broker, whose quality of civilization had an odor he recognized. That he was obliged to recognize it, that it was an odor Van Dillen obviously took for granted they had in common—something Kemp could not deny, even if he had so far demeaned himself as to attempt it, since denial would have been tantamount to admission—his visitor could hardly have given him offense more mortal. “I have business to attend to,” he said. “What is the nature of this proposal of yours?”

“Well, that is soon said. The underwriters, who have authorized me to speak for them, are willing to make a private settlement. This is not because we feel our case to be weak, far from it, but to save the trouble and costs of an action. We will not dispute the number cast overboard. In view of the time gone by and the difficulty of establishing anything after such an interval, we think it reasonable to set a value of ten guineas a head on the blacks, whether male or female, it makes no difference. At the number we have been given, that would amount to eight hundred and fifty guineas. I am authorized to offer that sum in complete settlement. It is a generous offer, under all the circumstances, and I trust that you will find it satisfactory.”

“No, I do not find it satisfactory,” Kemp said, with a perceptible increase in volume and eagerness of tone. “Generous offer? Do you take me for a supplicant? Be damned to your generosity, sir.” He paused a moment, then continued more quietly, with a rigid set of the jaw. “I will have my father’s rights in full. I will have a proper settlement by process of law. That ship was my father’s. He had her built and fitted out. The blacks were purchased with trade goods he had provided at his own expense. His last days were shadowed by that loss. I will have satisfaction for his name.”

Satisfaction for his investment, the broker was inclined to think, thereby doing Kemp less than justice and demonstrating the limits of his own understanding. His eye had been on the younger man’s right fist, which had clenched during this speech and whitened to a bloodless line along the knuckles. Van Dillen was a sedentary man, thick-necked and sometimes troubled these days by shortness of breath. This passion of retribution was disquieting to him. Kemp would seek to use the surviving seamen as witnesses in support of his claim on the insurers, and afterward do his best to see them hanged …

“Well,” he said, “I see you are set on the courts.”

“It is you who talk of the courts,” Kemp said, slowly opening the fingers of his hand. “I am set on obtaining my rights.”

The broker nodded. Rights were measured with money, in his view of things. The terms were more or less interchangeable. Kemp had money in plenty, but those with money always wanted more. It was a fact of life; he had never encountered a single exception to it. All the same, he was obliged to recognize now that there was more to this than money. He knew a good deal about the man sitting opposite him; he had made it his business to know. A career meteoric, even in these days of quick fortunes. Seventy thousand pounds, Jarrold’s daughter was said to have brought him, along with a share in the bank. The old man had lost his wits, as it was said, and was kept in confinement. The bank he had founded was in Kemp’s hands now. No, there was no shortage of money in that quarter. Of course, such a man would want to win all battles. How he had discovered their whereabouts, these remnants of slaves and crew, how he had been able to track them down in the wilds of southern Florida where they had taken refuge—these were matters not yet definitely known; there were conflicting accounts. No doubt much would be made clear in the course of the capital charges at the Old Bailey …

Van Dillen’s pale, heavy face registered nothing of these thoughts as he got to his feet. “I will take my leave, sir,” he said. “I have made the offer that was agreed among us. I am sorry you do not see fit—” He faltered a moment, meeting Kemp’s gaze, then said more firmly, “I think you are making a mistake, but the arbitration of law will settle the business one way or the other.”

Kemp assented to this indifferently and accompanied his visitor to the head of the stairs that led down to the street. Returning to his office, he walked to and fro for a while, possessed by a spirit of discontent. Glancing through the thick and rippled glass of his window, he had a distorted view of rooftops and chimneys. He saw pigeons rise, their wingbeats like a stirring in some opaque and viscous fluid. The window was fixed to the wall and could not be opened. The bank’s premises were old; they had been old in his father-in-law’s time. Jarrold had always been parsimonious; he had limited the windows in this room to one only, and had it fixed in place, in order to avoid the window taxes of the 1720s.

Kemp had not found it necessary to make any changes. London’s skies were fogged by smoke from a thousand chimneys. Lamps would have been needed to work by, in any case, for most of the year. He did not mind spending money where he saw it as necessary, but this was a place of business; he could see no point in trying to make it look like something else. He knew people who were spending considerable sums to make their offices resemble drawing rooms, with sash windows and chintz upholstery and cabinets of porcelain. Such extravagance was enough to ruin a man’s reputation for sober and reliable dealing.

Now, however, he would have liked to have a window he could throw open, to admit more air into the closeness of his office, expel the lingering traces of Van Dillen’s scent and sweat. As he paused in his pacing and stood still in the middle of the room, it seemed to him that this was also the smell of the world outside, that it came seeping through, thickened by stagnant sewage and fecal dust. He was a fastidious man, clean and scrupulous in his person and clothing, outward mark of his need to be beyond reproach in motive and behavior. He had never faltered in the attention he paid to his person, but in the pursuit of money to pay his father’s debts he had sometimes come short on the moral plane, had been obliged to breath a tainted air. He had suffered from this at the time, and continued to do so at the memory.

It was a similar sense of taint, a feeling of being contaminated, that troubled him now. He had been too eager with his explanations to this Dutch interloper, he had lowered himself. As if it mattered a straw whether the fellow appreciated his motives or not.

We generally like to regard ourselves in a good light, but the extent to which this matters varies from person to person. For Erasmus Kemp it mattered very much, and for this reason he had never been much given to any closeness of self-questioning. The answers to such questions will be ambiguous at best; motives will usually reveal themselves to be impure. Kemp had generally found it sufficient to assure himself of needing no one’s endorsement, whether friend or foe, not merely on particular occasions but generally. It was a question of dignity. And now here he was, disgusted with himself at the recollection of his vehemence before that foreigner, whom he had not liked, whose interests were opposed to his own.

A betrayal of himself, no less—and not the first since his return. Lately he had been increasingly subject to impulses to explain himself, justify himself, even with people he did not know well, a thing quite foreign to his usual self-containment, and to what he thought of as his true character. It was as though he were striving to shore up certainties previously held that seemed now in danger of slipping away. In an obscure fashion he was beginning to sense why this might be so. The principle of justice, always strong in him, had been violated by his own failure, since returning home, to find any feeling of happiness or cause for celebration at the success of his expedition to Florida. For great success it had been, there could be no doubt of that. He had hunted down the fugitives, white and black. He had used troops from the garrison at St. Augustine to flush them out. The remnants of the crew lay in prison now, awaiting trial.

A triumph, no other word for it. Why, then, this haunting sense of loss and waste? But it was not new, it had always been there, a companion continually neglected and forgotten, continually demanding to be recognized anew. All the successes of his life were consumed to ash in the fire of achieving, in the realization of his will and intention. Only the energy of planning, the envisaging of success gave him pleasure, only purposes had meaning for him. He had always lived by plans, by vows, by promises made to himself.

He brought to memory now, as if to make his success more real to him, the last hours of that colony of renegades, the approach through darkness, his tension of excitement kept under stern check, the stationing of the troops, the waiting for dawn. From the compound below there had come the sound of drum and fiddle and some kind of whistle or flute, a discordant music, sometimes passing into wild harmony. From the swamps all around the whine of mosquitos and the strange sharp clicking of young alligators as they snapped at frogs and turtles in the creeks. Those sounds, that night, the anticipation of capturing Paris and his motley associates and bringing them to justice—that had been happiness.

And now this sordid aftermath, this haggler of a broker coming with his “generous offer.” Kemp was shrewd in matters concerning money, with a shrewdness derived from years of business dealings. He knew he could have increased Van Dillen’s offer if he had been prepared to bargain. They would not want to risk an adverse judgment; none of the brotherhood at Lloyds would want a precedent established; increased indemnities on hazards to cargo could too easily be turned to the shipowners’ advantage. But this was a problem that did not concern him.

The triumph of the capture had not survived his hated cousin’s death. Nor had the hatred survived. This cousin, who had mortally offended him in childhood, who had been cast into Norwich Jail as a common prisoner and set in the pillory for printing seditious matter and denying Holy Writ, bringing disgrace on the whole family, who had led the crew of the Liverpool Merchant in mutiny and murder and made off with ship and cargo. A burden of accumulated bitterness lifted from his spirit by this death, but bringing neither freedom nor relief, only a sort of vacancy.

He had known it as he stood on the quarterdeck of the ship that was to bring them home, below that vast, all-encompassing sky, looking down at the men and women of the settlement and the children of their union. He had felt repugnance at the thought of white and black breeding together. Still in his hand the button Matthew had let fall as he died, a gift to the cousin who had hated him, who had brought the soldiers and ordered the shooting, a gift to the author of his death …

A thought of an unaccustomed kind came to him as he moved to reseat himself at his desk and resume the work that awaited him there. He had argued once, while still in Liverpool, with the girl he had wanted to marry, about a painting in her parents’ house, whether it was a painting of people in Paradise or just in a beautiful garden. Sarah and he had almost quarreled over it.

The people in the painting were happy and smiling and elegantly dressed, at ease in their surroundings. Somewhere there might be a place like this, a place where dwelt those who were caught and held in the anticipation of triumph, dwelling forever in some night of excited vigil, with the wild music sounding in their ears. Or even one for those who had realized their aims and were happy still. Somewhere there might be a piece of ground, a territory, where the following steps are also happy, the steps you take after the victory, after justice has been done and profits made, when you begin to walk away, when you return home …

Perhaps the coal fields of Durham might be such a place for him. The papers on the desk before him were mainly concerned with the mining industry. Since learning of Spenton’s desire for a loan he had spent a good deal of time studying production figures and methods of extraction in the eastern part of the county, toward the sea. He had talked to shipping agents, studied contracts made by the mine owners or their lessees with the lighter-men who loaded the coal at the wharfs of Hartlepool and carried it to the collier ships that would bring it down to the Pool of London. He had learned to his great satisfaction that the lease on Spenton’s mines was due to expire in a matter of weeks. He had worked out the terms of an offer that might be attractive to Spenton, linking the loan with revised conditions for the lease.

Spenton had not made any move to visit the bank, and Kemp, wanting to avoid all appearance of eagerness or haste, had waited for an invitation to the nobleman’s London house. Instead of this, Spenton had sent him a note by a servant, inviting him to be a guest at a party for dinner that he was giving at the Spring Gardens in Vauxhall in some days’ time. Kemp had learned later that Sykes too had been invited. It wasn’t exactly what he had wanted; there would be too many people. But he would be able to broach the matter, at least.

Jane Ashton’s face came to his mind again. It had all be gun there, this prospect for the future, this renewal of purpose and hope, it had all begun with her smile and her glance. Since that moment all had gone well, all was set fair. She had brought him luck. The present lease expired at just the right time for him, and there were no special bidding rights involved in its renewal.

She must have already known about the court cases that were pending. She must have understood that her brother’s interests were directly opposed to his, that the man she was looking at stood for everything her brother—and she too, no doubt—considered detestable. Yet there had been no hint of enmity in her regard, and he had been aware of none on his own part as he looked at her. And this was something so far outside his usual habit of mind as to seem almost miraculous.