He stood still for some moments as the voices retreated, struggling with a wild sense of improbability. It was as if the sounds of jubilation had not faded through distance but were somehow muted out of deference to this struggle of his, as he was carried back in mind to the quarterdeck of the ship that had borne them away from Florida, the people of the settlement, black and white, there in chains below him, the pain from the brass button, which he had been gripping so tightly that it had scored marks in his hand. Before this, the vague and beautiful eyes of the fiddler, his tears, his insolence …
He could not believe it still. But as the crowd thinned away, as some moments later he followed Spenton to the carriage that waited to take them back to Wingfield, he thought he heard sounds of fiddle music carried to him on the air.
“Is that the sound of a fiddle?” he said to the coachman, who was hovering nearby, ready to assist him in climbing up.
“Yes, sir,” the man said, “there is a fiddler come to Thorpe, the first that was ever here. He plays for them at the tavern.”
Kemp sat up late with Spenton, who was in festive mood. Between them they disposed of three bottles of champagne, and though Spenton drank much the most of this, Kemp, abstemious by nature and wary of indiscretion in his dealings with business associates—for this was all that Spenton was to him—felt his head clouded and confused as he made his way to bed, the ghost of the Irish fiddler still with him.
The phantasmic impression of resemblance came back to him in the moments before the fog of sleep descended, stronger, more distinct than before, bearing with it a conviction that owed its power to the superstition of his nature, grown more definite since his meeting with Jane Ashton, a sense of forces and currents that guided human destiny, controls that were arbitrary, accountable to nothing and no one … But if it had really been Sullivan, would he not have fled at once? Faced with the renewed threat of the hangman, would he have gone blithely on to the tavern to celebrate the occasion with his music? In the last moments of wakefulness the explanation came to him: the man could not have seen him; he had stood up only at the last moment; Sullivan, if it was he, had already gone past by then; before that, with the people standing packed together and the yard sloping only just enough to allow a view over the court, the people sitting below would probably not have been visible at all to any but those in the front rank.
The question was in his mind, throbbing at his temples along with the effects of the wine, when he rose next morning. It demanded an answer. Spenton, who seemed none the worse for wear, was intending to spend most of the morning closeted with his steward. This left Kemp free for some hours. He was intending to return to the mine to inspect the pumping equipment for use in the event of flooding, and after this—more important now to his mind—to ride over the fields that ran alongside the Dene and examine the lie of the land at the far end, where it opened out toward the sea.
But before he did anything else, he was resolved to pay a visit to the alehouse and have a look at this newly arrived fiddler.
30
“He was the only one of them that had the power of sharin’,” Sullivan said. “The sister was grateful an’ the others took an interest, but he was the only one that could touch it in his mind. He shared Billy’s end, he shared the life we had in the wilderness, the kind of crops we had, the creatures that lived there with us.”
He was standing in the taproom close to Sally—as close as he could get without impeding her—while she restored the tankards, rinsed and dried, to their shelves. “An’ the reason for that,” he said, “the reason for that sharin’, lies in the power of imaginin’ a thing that you have niver lived through. It is the power of imaginin’ that makes a man stand out, an’ it is rarer than you might think. It is similar to the power of music.”
His back was to the yard door, which was open, and it was only when he heard steps that he turned.
“I see you know me,” Kemp said. “You are Sullivan, the fiddler, are you not?”
It was at this point that the interview, or confrontation rather, rapidly rehearsed by Kemp on his way here, began to deviate from what had been envisaged. Instead of cringing like a guilty man for whom the gallows were waiting, this vagabond raised his head and looked him in the eye, and he was suddenly reminded of the man’s habit of seeming to gaze after some lost splendor, glimpsed a moment before, gone before it could be seized. He himself was not that longed-for sight, so much was certain. But whatever the gaze he got, there was no fear in it.
“I am so,” Sullivan said. It seemed to him now that he had always known that his freedom had a term to it, that the Holy Mother’s protection would run out once he had fulfilled his vow, and that this was only reasonable and to be expected. “You are the one that set the sojers onto us,” he said. “I niver thought to see you here. Have you come all this weary way just to find me?”
“I did not come to find you—I did not know you were here.” Kemp saw that the woman, who was brown-haired and fresh-faced and ample of form, had drawn closer to Sullivan and stood beside him now, her shoulder against his. Again he had the sense that this encounter was in some way going awry. He was surprised to feel none of the righteous anger he had expected to feel at having run to earth this fugitive from justice, who should have been hanged and tarred and hung in chains like the others. But of course he had not run the fellow to earth at all; there had been no pursuit, no high quest, it had all been accidental. How could justice triumph by accident, at random? “What are you doing here?” he said.
“I came to tell Billy Blair’s folks what became of the lad. I made a vow to do it if iver I got free, an’ the prison gates were opened to me.” There was no thought of flight in his mind—he had nowhere to run to. This man had the power that came from money; he would send people to seize him, as he had done once before. Sally was close beside him, listening to his words, noting his bearing. He would make a good figure in her eyes, even if they were never to rest on him again.
“I made a vow to bring you all to justice and see you hanged,” Kemp said. “I crossed the Atlantic to do it.” He felt an immediate sharp regret at having said these words. It was as if he had lost all guard on his tongue. To compare his own high purposes with the petty vows of an Irish vagrant! He felt weakened by the ad mission, as though he were seeking to share—a notion abhorrent to him. “Who is Billy Blair?” he said, not really caring to know.
“He was my shipmate. He was killed by the redcoats you set on to us. He was shot in the back.”
It had the ring of an accusation. Kemp looked at the couple before him for some moments without speaking. She still stood there beside the man, keeping close to him. Sullivan had found the support of a woman, just as he had himself … Forgiveness was weakness, it was lack of energy, a dereliction of duty. He remembered again how Sullivan had wept as Matthew lay dying. An insult at the time, it had seemed to him, grief for the cousin who had done him such wrong. Now a grief he could feel too. Again this sense of sharing, strangely less repugnant now. This was the man who had attended Matthew on his deathbed, almost to the moment of death, the last to show love to him. The button Matthew had held so tightly, had only let fall as he breathed his last …
“It was you, wasn’t it?” he said. “It was you who gave my cousin that button?”
“I am not the man to deny that,” Sullivan said. “It was all I had to give him. It was the last of me buttons that was left.” In the stress of the moment the old grievance came back to him. “The others were robbed off me aboard the Liverpool Merchant. Fourteen years ago now. When I come aboard I was stripped of a good coat on the grounds that it was crawlin’ with fleas, which was an outright falsehood. The bosun it was that stole me buttons, though they brought him no luck.”
“This one has brought luck to me,” Kemp said, and only the sense of shared ground, accepted now, could have brought him to make such a confidence. As he uttered the words, the truth of them came home to him in a luminously glinting flood. The great poss
ibilities of the mine returned to his mind, the improvements he would make, the rewards of expanding trade and increased profits. It was a worthy enterprise, a noble enterprise, one that a man could give his life to. Spenton would feel the pinch of debt again, he might be persuaded to sell the colliery outright. He would ask Jane to marry him, he would have a fine house built. Together, here in Durham, they would make a new life. There was the Dene, the wonderful discovery of the Dene, a direct route to the sea, only three miles, a loaded wagon on a good road would take less than an hour. He would have wharves constructed, he would have his own barges to take the coal out to the collier ships. No middlemen, no dues, no rights of way to argue about, no problems with labor …
He looked again at the man and woman standing there together. In the few minutes since he had entered they had stripped his purpose from him. It had ceased to make any difference to him now what happened to Sullivan, where he went, what became of him. The high mission lay all in the past. It was Sullivan who had made the gift of the button. He had always thought of it as a gift from his cousin, though accidental, but Matthew had merely passed it on. Nothing was accidental; he ought to have known that. The true giver had been the man before him. He dug finger and thumb into his waistcoat pocket, took out the button, held it out on the palm of his hand. “This is the button, is it not?”
Sullivan took a step forward and lowered his head in scrutiny. “It is so,” he said. “It is the selfsame button.” When he looked up, it was for the moment as if he had glimpsed more closely the glory his eyes always seemed to be seeking. “How did you come by it?” he asked.
Kemp made no answer to this. He replaced the button and paused a moment. Then he said, “You need have no fear of being apprehended. I shall not report you. I shall say nothing of your presence here. It has been a lucky button for you too, my friend.”
On this, without glancing again at the man on whom he was thus conferring life and liberty, he turned away and walked out of the room.
He took leave of Lord and Lady Spenton and uttered his thanks that same evening. Next day, at first light, with no thought in his mind but that he would soon be seeing Jane Ashton, he had his mount made ready and set off for the city of Durham in time to take the morning stage.
31
At about the same time that Erasmus Kemp was making his way to the alehouse for a word or two with the fiddler, a servant of Spenton’s was knocking on the door of the Bordon cottage with the message that his master would greatly like to have a word or two with Michael Bordon.
Michael at this time was well into his fourteen-hour shift. The labor was the same as always: with the help of the boy, a thirteen-year-old named Jack, he gathered the coal cut from the face by the hewer, loaded it into the corves, dragged and pushed the sledge with the full corves on it to the foot of the shaft, where they were tallied and hoisted to the surface by the banksmen. But the ceiling was low in the gallery where they were working this morning; he had to keep his head well down and move in a sort of a half crouch, and he was beginning to feel this in the tendons of his neck and the muscles of his shoulders. It was only when he reached the foot of the shaft that he could stand upright, and it was here that the deputy overman found him and relayed the message.
He had to walk back home, wash in the yard, get into his best suit. He was driven to the house in a two-wheeled carriage. The manservant, who had come from London with Lord Spenton, was supercilious and spoke little to Michael in the course of the journey, though he strove to give the impression that he was fully conversant with his master’s wishes and knew the reason for the summons.
Michael had never been to this house before, and a certain awe descended on him as the trap proceeded smartly up the broad driveway and drew up before the great stone façade. He was handed over to another servant, conducted to a sitting room and told to wait. He spent a quarter of an hour in company with furniture of a grandness never before seen. There was an imposing table surmounted by a mirror with lamps on either side fixed on a brass rail and drawers below with lions’ heads carved on them, each lion with a brass ring through its jaws, by means of which, as he supposed, the drawers could be pulled open. There was a smaller table, for which he could see no need, two easy chairs set facing each other with a stool between them so one could either sit or lie, a settee of a type he could scarcely have imagined, specially designed to fit into a corner of a room. The armchair he sat in was deep; the back and sides were thickly padded, and the wings cut off his vision, making him feel strangely enclosed and imprisoned. On the walls were pictures of hills and lakes. The abundance and elaboration and uselessness of the objects in this room made a deep and abiding impression on him.
The servant who had led him here came now to inform him that Lord Spenton was ready to see him. He followed this man down a carpeted corridor, through a small anteroom and then into what he thought must be his lordship’s study, as the walls were lined with books. Spenton was at his desk and without rising waved him to a seat opposite. “Well, young man,” he said, “perhaps you would care for a glass of wine?” Without waiting for an answer he spoke to the servant, who had remained at the door, and asked him to bring a bottle of the white and two glasses.
While they waited for this, Spenton contemplated his guest in silence for some moments, noting the stiffness of his posture as he sat bolt upright in his chair, turning his cap in his hands. “I asked you to come here so I could thank you,” he said. “You played a splendid game yesterday—all who saw you thought so. I was delighted with our win over Pemberton—over Northfield colliery, I mean to say—and I am resolved you shall be our champion again next year.”
Michael uttered thanks for this praise, but the stiffness of his bearing was not relaxed, and Spenton, in an effort to set him more at his ease, began to question him about his family. The intention of kindness was obvious, and Michael was emboldened by it. He spoke about his parents and his brothers, especially Percy, the youngest, who was soon to be going down the mine. “We dinna know how old the lad is, not to the day,” he said. “The births are not written, nor the deaths neither. So my father says come mid-August he shall gan doon.”
Spenton nodded. “Are you walking out with someone?” he said.
“Yes, sir, Elsie Foster. We are plannin’ to wed.”
“You will be getting a barrowman’s pay?”
“Two shillin’ for shiftin’ the stint, sir. It is nay so much to start a family on, but a’m gannin on for twenty-two, a can hope to be cuttin’ the coal soon, an’ then a’ll be on six shillin’.”
“You will make your way, I have no doubt of that. But I would like to help you on a little. I have felt that it would be a fitting way to mark the occasion of our win yesterday.”
At this point the wine was brought in. The servant waited for some moments, but Spenton dismissed him, rose to pour the wine himself and brought Michael’s glass to him, setting it down on the small table beside his guest’s chair. “Here’s to our victory!” he said, raising his glass.
Michael drank and found the taste distinctly agreeable—he had never drunk wine before. He was puzzled by this repetition of “our,” not really seeing how it could be thought of as Lord Spenton’s victory, though of course his lordship had always shown great interest in the handball matches, and seen that the court was kept up and the lines freshly marked out. He must mean the colliery too; it was a victory for Thorpe, certainly. Then a further reason came to him like a shaft of light: everyone he knew with any pennies to spare had bet on the result; his own father had put a shilling on him, he knew that for certain; Lord Spenton and the colonel would have done the same.
He drank some more wine, settled back in his chair. A bit more than a shilling, he thought, a canny bit more. The id ea, once lodged, took on the immediate force of conviction. This was the explanation for all the condescension and affability; there could be no other. The belief that there had been material gain on Lord Spenton’s part did more to give him self-assurance than
all the words that had gone before.
There was a short silence between them. Then Spenton said, “I would like to show my appreciation of your performance by making you a small gift, no more than a token really, in recognition of the skill and spirit you showed yesterday. I thought that fifty guineas might meet the case.”
It took Michael some moments to follow this ornate phrasing and arrive at the meaning. Fifty guineas! He could barely imagine what so much money would look like if it was all put together—he had never seen coins in a quantity great enough to do more than cover the palm of one hand. Had it not been for the warmth of the wine and the reassuring thought—so reassuring that it had to be true—that Lord Spenton, so powerful and grand, had cause to be grateful, had made money out of him, Michael Bordon, a common pitman, he would never have found the courage even to think what he thought now, let alone say the words that came to him to say to this man at the desk, whose face had lost all expression at his hesitation.
“It is generous in you, sir, more than a could ever have thowt, only for winnin’ at the handball. A dinna know if it would be enough … Would it be enough to buy the bit of land doon by the beck?”
The Quality of Mercy: A Novel Page 27