The Quality of Mercy: A Novel

by Barry Unsworth

  Stanton paused now to gather himself for the peroration. He could see nothing on the faces of judges or jury that might indicate the nature of their feelings or thoughts, but this, in his experience, was almost invariably the case.

  “And then, what did they do then?” he demanded. “Did they attack the captain? No, they did not. All they did was to desist, to pause in their task, no more than that. It is not true that the first act of aggression came from the crew. You have heard the testimony of the ship’s interpreter, James Porter. The first act of aggression was that of the captain, in drawing his pistol. Before this, no harm came to anyone. It is clear that there was no initial intention of harm on the part of the crew. Where is the conspiracy in this, where the concerted uprising? Their only crime was to listen to the dictates of a higher law. I beseech the court to grant true justice to these men, the justice all of us here present would hope for in this world and the next, that which is tempered with mercy.”

  On this he fell silent and returned to his place in the court. The High Lord of the Admiralty conferred briefly with his colleagues on the bench, all of whom nodded their heads in agreement. Then he addressed himself to the jury. He pointed out that while it was true that in England the offense of piracy had not been defined in any statute, a great deal of legislation had been enacted dealing with the punishment of robbers at sea. He referred them to the two most recent Piracy Acts, those of 1699 and 1721, which had further defined and amplified the nature of this felony. He would take leave to deliver the essence of the matter shorn of needless complications. If, in any place where the Lords of the Admiralty had jurisdiction, the mariner of any ship should violently dispossess the master and afterward carry away the ship itself or any of the goods aboard her, that was robbery and piracy and carried with it, if proved, a sentence of death. They did not need to concern themselves with the nature of the cargo, or whether there was intention to return, or with any subsequent relations between the crew members and the negroes. The law was very clear. Was there a mutiny? Was there violent dispossession of the master? Was the vessel carried off? They should decide on their verdict in the light of these questions.

  Almost as soon as the presiding judge began his direction of the jury, Ashton knew with intense disappointment that the case was lost. It came as no surprise, though with an increase of bitterness, when the jury, after conferring briefly among themselves, standing together in the body of the court, brought in a verdict of guilty, without reference to mitigating circumstances and with no recommendation to mercy.

  The crew members were led in from the bail dock to take their places before the bench. They stood facing the robed figures raised above them, whose faces and great wigs only were visible to them above the nosegays that had been placed on the table to sweeten the air and protect the judges from the stench and foul breath.

  The courtroom was silenced by the crier with the time-honored words: “My Lords, the King’s Justices, strictly charge and command all manner of persons to keep silence while sentence of death is passing on the prisoners at the bar.”

  However, there was still a surprise to come, and it was contained in the manner of the sentencing. The Lord Admiral did not rise immediately but remained seated and spoke to the court as a whole. “We, through the powers vested in us by the grace of His Royal Highness, King George the Third, do represent the power of the law but do also represent the mercy of the law, and in this blend lies the majesty of the law and also its mystery, as not lying within the common prediction. We hereby acquit and pardon the men Morgan and Hughes, who were for different reasons not present on deck at the time of the mutiny and therefore took no direct part in it. These men may walk free from the court.”

  The two were immediately led away to have their fetters struck off by the turnkeys in the Yard. The Justice waited for some moments until quiet was restored, then got to his feet. He laid the black cloth over the crown of his wig and observed an impressive pause before speaking directly to the men standing below him, who waited dumbly for the words they knew would signal their death. In this shared knowledge they stood side by side, enfeebled by the weeks in prison, exhausted by the weight of their shackles, convicted of a crime too distant for them to recognize. Only Rimmer and Barber made the effort to raise their eyes to the figure standing above them; the others kept their heads bowed. And in the contrast made by this wretchedness with the solemn ritual of the court, the august judges in their scarlet apparel, the rhetoric of the advocates, the silver mace, emblem of authority, lying among the nosegays on the table, the Lord High Admiral’s remarks about the majesty and mystery of the law were given abundant illustration.

  The law is that ye shall return from hence to the place whence ye came, and from thence to the place of execution, where ye shall hang by the neck till the body be dead, dead, dead. And the Lord have mercy on your souls.

  23

  Bitterly disappointed as he was, and enraged by the verdict, Ashton lost no time in quitting the courtroom, and Jane was obliged to hasten away with him. He was not sufficiently in possession of himself to stay for any words with Stanton, a discourtesy he afterward regretted; his friend had made a good case, the blame was not his but that of the world at large, as represented by the judges and the jury. This hasty retreat of brother and sister left Kemp feeling obscurely cheated, though of what he could not easily have said; there could have been no exchange of words with Jane, not at such a time, not when her brother had suffered such a defeat and he himself was dressed in victory.

  The judges had left the bench and mounted to the upper floor to be disrobed, but Pike was still in the courtroom, and Kemp made his way toward the lawyer with the intention of expressing his pleasure at the verdict and his congratulations on the way the case had been conducted. He had never taken much to Pike, while admitting his quality as an advocate. But now, as he approached, it came to him that the suitable thing was to suggest sharing a bottle together and drinking to their success.

  Pike showed every sign of pleasure at the suggestion. “There is the George, just round the corner, in Ludgate Street,” he said. “It is a tolerable place. I have used it before.”

  It was only when the two of them were seated together over a bottle of Madeira that Kemp began to express his thanks and congratulations. “I must say, you chose your words extremely well,” he said. “And not only the words but the right time to utter them.”

  “Long practice, sir.” Pike smiled, clearly pleased at the compliment.

  “I was sorry, though, to see Hughes and Morgan get off scot-free. It is the merest quibble to suggest that they were not part of the mutiny.”

  “We may owe that to Mr. Stanton’s final plea, though not in the way he intended it.”

  An expression had appeared on the lawyer’s face as he spoke that Kemp had seen there not infrequently before and did not much care for, a look that went with the tone of his voice: amused, sardonic, in a way regretful.

  “How do you mean?” he asked, with a certain coldness.

  “Well, you will remember that he urged the court to show mercy as they themselves would wish for mercy? Perhaps you did not glance at the Lord High Admiral’s face as these words were uttered.”

  “No, as a matter of fact I did not.”

  “He was not pleased, sir, he was not pleased at all. He did not care to be included in that way, lumped together with common mortals. He sits in judgment, you see, he delivers the sentence. While he is up there on the bench in his robes of office he is not in need of mercy. It is those below him who are in need of that—in sore need, often enough. No, I think Stanton made a mistake there. It is one often made by zealous reformers—they are too set on benefiting the human race, they forget to make allowance for divergent views of what is beneficial.”

  “Well, but the two men were pardoned, after all.”

  “Having first been found guilty. That was not Stanton’s aim, nor was it Ashton’s. They wanted them all acquitted. The Lord Admiral, on the other
hand, wanted to show that he it is who doles out justice and mercy. In the right measure and proportion, of course.” Pike smiled and raised his glass. “He and no one else,” he said. “Here is to the law, sir. If the judge had not wished to assert his prerogatives, those two would probably have been condemned to death along with the rest.”

  Kemp nodded. “I see, yes.” But even as they drank together, even though grateful to Pike for his efforts, he found his old disapproval returning, and for the same reason. Pike made light of the institution that gave him his reputation and his living—a good living too. It was ungrateful; it was even duplicitous. And Pike grew aware of it now, as before, this disapproval, and as before felt a kind of contempt for it, the lack of humor, the rigidity of mind, impelling him—and this too not for the first time—to do further outrage to his client’s sense of propriety. Propriety and property, the fellow’s guiding lights …

  “I am not altogether sure that it was wise to appeal to the jury’s sense of common humanity either,” he said. “Or to urge them to imagine the state of mind of the crew on that distant morning.”

  “I don’t see much wrong in that.”

  “The jury is open to pity, both singly and by a sort of contagion, as are we all. But the ability to imagine the thoughts and feelings of others is a great deal rarer than might be thought, and people will quickly grow hostile if urged to exercise a faculty they do not possess. Nor will they always wish to share their humanity with the accused persons in the dock, especially when these persons are common seamen, and ragged and penniless into the bargain. They would rather recognize common humanity in persons more closely resembling themselves, or better still, persons higher up in the scale of things. The jurors are men of property, sir, they are landowners. Small landowners, to be sure, but landowners nevertheless. There is a property qualification at present set at fifteen pounds a year.”

  “That is very little.”

  “Indeed it is, sir, indeed it is. But it must be remembered that probably close on three-quarters of the inhabitants of this great city will be too poor even to pay taxes, much less be in possession of freehold or copyhold to any extent of value at all. This huge mass of humanity lies just below the noses of the jurors. They can smell it, sir. Their greatest fear is to slide back down into it.”

  He paused for some moments, raising his glass to drink. With the case ended and his connection with his client about to be dissolved, he felt a lightening of the oppression he had always felt in Kemp’s company. “No,” he said, “they want to share their common humanity with the creditor, the landlord, the masters of ships, the employers of labor. And these last want to share their common humanity with those of wider acres and larger possessions.”

  “Well,” Kemp said, “it is natural for men to want to better themselves.”

  “So it is. And the trick of it, in the courts, is to play on this natural wish as much as possible. That is why I spoke as I did of the mob. The fear of the mob is stronger among those who have small possessions, because they are closer in dealings and in neighborhood to people of violent and disorderly life. And the fear has grown stronger than ever in these last years, with the fluctuations in the price of bread and the rioting that has resulted. It is not a month since the militia had to be called out again. The protestors were more than a thousand strong, and they would not disperse until a dozen of them had been shot.”

  Kemp drank some more of his wine without making any immediate reply. He felt that justice had been done that day, in the main at least—two had escaped, but five would hang. There was Sullivan too, still at large. His long journey, the time he had lost, the money he had spent, the rightness of his cause—all had been justified by the verdict and the sentence. But this quick-tongued fellow made no mention of that, dwelling instead on tricks and ploys. “We were in the right and that was recognized by the court,” he said at last, resolving to take his leave before very much longer. The other’s way of looking at the world was distasteful to him; Pike took everything together, as if the distinction between right and wrong were shadowy and obscure, when every man of good character knew that it was abundantly clear. And yet there was no indulgence, no complacency of acceptance in the lawyer’s tone; his voice had an edge to it, in spite of the smiles, something of bitterness even, as if he would change things if he could.

  “The thing most to be hoped for,” the lawyer said now, “is that the common run of people, that great riotous mass within the range of the nostrils of those with fifteen pounds a year, people who have never owned anything, who could hardly be said to own themselves, might somehow be persuaded to share their common humanity with the property-owning classes and help to keep them in their places, in the hope that by so doing they will be more likely to become property owners themselves.”

  Pike did not exactly smile as he said these words, but he stretched his mouth and shook his head slowly, in a way that seemed theatrical to Kemp, making him suspect that the lawyer was not entirely serious in what he said, whereas he himself found the words eminently reasonable and felt they represented a hope for a better and safer society. “Not many would realize such an ambition,” he said. “One in a hundred, perhaps. But it would be of great benefit to public order and the security of the realm. Fewer windows would be broken, fewer people would be shot.”

  “Indeed, sir,” Pike said, though still with an expression that seemed to Kemp less than properly earnest. “Above all, it would give the people hope. Hope deferred, sir, hope of betterment endlessly deferred, that is what binds people together.”

  “I suspect that your adversary of today would see the matter differently,” Kemp said, as he rose to his feet.

  “Stanton? I have known Horace Stanton for a good many years now. We have met both in the courtroom and out of it. An excellent advocate, with great resources of feeling—and that makes for effective argument, you know, juries can be swayed by feeling when they are not closed off from it by fear. All the same, Stanton has one great fault.”

  “What is that?”

  Pike smiled slightly and looked directly into Kemp’s eyes as the two men shook hands. “He needs always to believe he is entirely in the right, which no one can ever be, you know.”

  Kemp was more than halfway home, quite close to Aldwych, before it came to him that Pike’s final words had been aimed at him as much as at Stanton, that the lawyer had wanted to give him something in the nature of a parting shot. Following immediately on this realization there came a strange, extremely unwelcome feeling of envy for Pike. Pike didn’t need to feel justified, he didn’t need to feel in full possession of the truth, he could go this way or that, he could stand back and take a look and choose, he needed no blessing, no angelic guidance. Pike was a free man.

  So perverse and appalling to him was this feeling that he spent the rest of the way home rebutting it, repairing the breach, restoring his previous disapproval of the lawyer. What was such freedom worth? Pike had no goals, no overriding purposes. He shifted with circumstance, he could recite any part. How could such a life be tolerable? He himself was soon to depart for Durham, and his goals were clear to him: he would survey the mine, he would determine what was needed, he would improve working methods, achieve higher production and increased profits. These were things that a man could aim at, could believe in. He it was who had a firm grip on reality, not Pike. On his return home he would call on Jane Ashton, he would have her face before him, he would tell her of the plans he had made during the time of their separation. One day, but not just yet, he would ask her if she had been at the Spring Gardens that night, the night of the fireworks.

  24

  “Lookin’ at it another way,” Sullivan said to the man working beside him, “I had the woman before they took me off, so me money was not lost an’ obliterated intoirely, I had some value from it. I am not the man to deny that, though the pleasure was fleetin’.”

  “No regrets, that’s my motto,” the man said. “I never ’ave no regrets. There is bad t
hings that happen, but we still got our arms and legs, ain’t we?”

  “I was expectin’ her to tell them misbegotten creatures that the money belonged to the both of us, that it was joint stock, to use the language of commerce. But she kept mum, she had no scrap of a notion of sharin’. If she had spoke up, I would niver have found meself here in this workhouse.”

  “Well, whores is various, one from another. They have all got the same thing between their legs, but their character is widely different. No regrets—next time you might come across a good ’un.”

  Side by side at their task of plaiting strands of hemp fiber into rope, they spoke in low tones so as not to attract the attention of the overseer.

  “This work is takin’ the skin off me fingers,” Sullivan said. “It will reduce the power of me music. I will have the law of them for robbin’ me of me livelihood. I am not the man to deny that there is always the prospect of a rainbow just round the corner, but what I am sayin’ is that them watchmen would niver have fetched me here if that woman had shown a drop or two of the milk of human kindness.”

  His companion was a thinly clad, emaciated man with a light of fever in his eyes. “Them was not reg’lar watchmen,” he said now. “Far from it. You won’t find reg’lar watchmen goin’ round at night lookin’ for vagrants, you will find them at home by the fire.”

  “I thought as much. I knew there was somethin’ about them fellers that didn’t tally. I suspected somethin’ from the start. I wasn’t born yesterday, I told them, show me your badge of office, I said, but of course there was no answer forthcomin’.”

  “What it is, you see, they farms it out. The watchman what is appointed by the parish has the task of bringin’ in vagrants wherever he can find them. He gets fourpence a head. So he hires two men to do the rounds in his place, an’ for every one they brings in he gives them a penny each. He halves his fee, but he stays at home out of trouble. An’ he gets his wages in any case, a shillin’ a day.”