“What is that, is it something new?”
He told her then about his idea of building a road through the Dene, a road straight through to the sea, only three miles—four if you counted the distance from the pithead. The sides of the ravine were steep and wooded, he told her, but below, where the stream ran, the ground was level, there was space enough. Straight through to the sea without impediment. The land where the Dene opened out was marshy, but the roadway could be raised. He would have a harbor built. “At present,” he said, “a good deal of the coal is sold locally, there at the pit, to save the cost of transport. The road once made, we can abandon that practice, we can have all of it shipped south to the foundries, where the prices are much higher.”
“So the road would pass over where the stream is now?”
“Yes, the water will have to be dammed up somehow, or diverted, otherwise it would wear away the foundations of the road. We will have to fell some of the trees so as to give space for the wagons.”
Erasmus paused for a moment, aware of the face before him, the look of serious inquiry on it, so sweet to him. Love gathered in his throat. “If only you could come and see for yourself,” he said. “If only we could go together. I want you to see it as I see it, and understand what it will mean to the work of the colliery.”
“How could I?” She smiled at his eagerness. “We could not travel together or stay together when we arrived there. I suppose you do not see us as fellow guests of Lord Spenton.”
With a sudden movement Erasmus set down the teacup he had been holding. “Say you will marry me,” he said. He would have knelt before her, but the table lay between them. Instead he rose to his feet and stood glowering down at her. “Say you will marry me,” he said again. “If you will marry me, you will make me live again. Everything I have and everything I am I lay at your feet. I will give up the bank’s holdings in the West Indies, if it will please you and your brother. Anything you ask of me I will do, only say you will marry me, say you will be my wife.”
Her smile had faded with his words. In the surprise of it—not the question itself, she had entertained the possibility of his proposing to her, but the haste and violence of the pleading in it—she felt the color leave her face. She had never thought to be wanted in such a way. Even some pity for him came to her, for the terrible nakedness of his declaration and his promises; some apprehension too, as if, on his feet as he was and with looks so burning, he might move to her, take hold of her, before she could find resolution or words to stay him.
“I cannot decide so quickly,” she said. “You must give me time, Erasmus. You must give me some days. There is my brother …”
“I will speak to him. I will undertake to sever all my connections with the Africa trade. I will declare my support for the abolition of slavery. I will announce it in a form that he and I can agree on together, a form he can use for his purposes, for his cause … When can I have your answer?”
“I must think … You must give me some days.”
“May I hope, at least?”
The look she gave him was an answer sufficiently eloquent, and it was this look, and this hope, that he carried away with him.
34
Ashton returned home early in the evening after a long consultation with his new lawyer, Harvey, the young barrister recommended by Stanton, a convinced abolitionist who had offered his services free in the Evans case. It was Ashton’s view now that Horace Stanton’s withdrawal from the case—felt at the time as failure of nerve and betrayal on his friend’s part—had been on the whole a good thing. This new man was still on the right side of thirty, full of fire and energy, just what was needed. He had entirely supported the decision to prosecute Bolton and Lyons on the original charges of criminal assault and abduction carried out in the attempt to return Evans by force to Jamaica. And he shared Ashton’s hope that such an action, never brought before on behalf of a former slave, might result in a judgment that set an absolute prohibition on all private attempts in future to transport anyone without consent out of the kingdom, which Harvey hoped to show was tantamount to saying that no person, having once set foot in England, could any longer be regarded as the property of another. The date for the hearing had finally been set, and Ashton was intending to inform his sister of this, but she was before him with the news of Kemp’s proposal, eager to confront, as soon as she could, what she felt likely to be an unfavorable reception.
Her brother’s looks confirmed this suspicion now. He was silent for some moments, then said, “Well, it has hardly been a protracted courtship. I had no idea that things had reached so far between you.”
It was as if he were accusing her of a haste that was unbecoming. “He spoke on the spur of the moment,” she said. “He will be leaving for Durham again before very long. He wanted to have some hope of a favorable reply while he is still here in London.” Did Frederick really think she would keep him informed from day to day of the attraction that had grown, the looks, the tones? She was not herself conscious of any precipitation in the relations between them. It had all begun the evening of her visit to her friend Anne Sykes, a good while before Frederick had so much as set eyes on Erasmus.
“You did not give him an answer, then?”
“No, I told him I needed time to consider.”
“Well, my dear Jane, you must consider it well and carefully. Mr. Kemp represents many things that you and I dislike and find deplorable—the wrong use he makes of capital invested through his bank, the fortune he has made in the sugar trade. The slave trade, in other words.” He paused a moment, then said somberly, “At least, I have always supposed that we share these feelings.”
“He is much more than that,” she said with sudden warmth, recalling the pity she had felt for him, the terrible singleness of purpose that made him undefended. What Frederick said was like comparing a creature with a beating heart to a bloodless abstraction, a bank, an economic system. “He is changing,” she said. “He could be guided by someone who understood him and appreciated his talents. He wants to introduce new methods of production, new ways of doing things, he wants to create more wealth so that everyone will benefit. He never wanted to go into the sugar trade—he was forced into it in order to pay his father’s debts. He always wanted to build things, to make roads and canals, to construct a better society.”
She broke off, aware of having gone too far in these praises, revealed too much of what she hoped rather than what she knew. Frederick would not understand in any case; he could not envisage progress except through changes in the law. But improvements could be made by acting directly, fighting abuses where you found them. She had always believed this; it was what had first attracted her to Erasmus, his combativeness, his readiness to enter the lists and charge at things and make them better. She would be able to help him in this, if she so chose … “He is ready to do anything,” she said. “He will withdraw completely from the Africa trade, he will dissociate himself entirely from it, cut off all the ties of business that unite him to it.”
“What, he has said this?”
“Yes, he said so to me.”
“Would he be willing to make a public statement to that effect, declare a change of heart, come out as an opponent of the slave trade?”
“Yes,” Jane said, and felt a familiar dismay at this new tone, this alerted, sharp-eyed face that was her brother’s now. “Yes, so he declared to me,” she said.
“Well, that makes all the difference,” Ashton said. “It would be an earnest of his good faith.”
She could not see that it made any difference at all, not to the desirability of the marriage, not to her prospects of happiness. But she knew, with a hurt that had also grown familiar, that these were matters of secondary importance to him. “It would be an earnest of his desire to marry me, so much is true,” she said. “And of his desire to disarm your enmity,” she added after a moment.
But he was too much taken up with thoughts of the use that could be made of such a declaration
to pay much heed to this. “It is exactly what I wanted from him.”
“Yes, you wanted me to ask it as a favor. You will remember that we disagreed about it.”
“Well, for all practical purposes it comes to the same thing. What did you say to him? Did you accept this offer of his?”
“I said nothing at the time, I was in some confusion. But if I had replied, it would have been to say that I think he should make such a statement only if he really means it, if it is truly a change of heart and not just a form of words designed to please me.” Or worse still, she thought, an offer of exchange, a form of bargaining such as one might use in the marketplace. But would there be, for Erasmus, any discernible difference? She had been pleased by the offer, by the air of sacrifice he gave it, pleased and flattered. But was it so great a sacrifice? All his interest now lay in the coal industry … She felt a sudden lurch of uncertainty, a fraying of safe moorings.
“You and I are very different in the way we look at things,” Ashton said, “and it has taken the advent of Mr. Kemp to make this difference clearer, I think to both of us. I see it matters to you what his motives are, but it has no importance for me. Motives are a labyrinth we need not enter. All that matters is the use that can be made of his words. Every year ships leave our ports and ports all over Europe, bound for the west coast of Africa. Hundreds of ships. Every year scores of thousands of innocent human beings are taken by violence from their homes to be worked to death on the plantations. If Kemp’s words can make any contribution, however slight, to the movement to end this infamous traffic, what can it matter whether they are uttered to please you or because he means them, or for some other reason?”
“It is not the same thing,” Jane said. “Abolition is a noble cause, I do not deny it, but the numbers are very great. You are not involved in close relations with anyone in particular, whereas it is very necessary for any couple who think of marrying to have respect for each other, and that must include a regard for the truth of the other person and the honesty of his motives.”
But he scarcely listened; his own words had impassioned him. “We have a date set now,” he said, “a date for the hearing concerning the condition of Jeremy Evans, whether slave or free. We may get a verdict that will change the face of the law, abolish forever the right of property in another person, in England at least. That is the purpose, we believe it is noble. We may have ulterior motives, but what end would it serve for us to examine into them?”
“But there would be no need to do so. Your motive and your purpose are one and the same thing.”
“And so it is, I suppose, with Mr. Kemp.”
With a sense of falling back onto safe ground, Jane strove to infuse her voice with firmness and said, “If Erasmus, or anyone, makes a declaration in order to serve his ends rather than serve the truth, that is wrong and will always be so, no matter what use is made of the words or how noble the cause.” But suppose Erasmus thought that serving his ends was serving the truth, suppose he saw no difference? It seemed possible from her knowledge of him.
“And you think the cause is thereby made less worthy?” Ashton said.
It was a way out, and in her confusion she took it gratefully. “No, I do not think that.”
On this note of compromise they fell silent. And when they resumed their talk it was of other things.
35
When Kemp thought afterward about his conversation with Lord Spenton, and went over in his mind the words exchanged between them, what struck him as least supportable was the way in which he was allowed to go on at such length and enter into such detail about his idea for a road through the Dene before Spenton raised a hand in languid fashion—rather in the manner of one requesting less volume of sound—to announce that a piece of the Dene was no longer in his ownership.
“Not for the next forty years, at least,” he said, and Kemp, in the midst of his consternation, saw that he looked quite unperturbed as he spoke. There was even a slight smile on his face.
“How can that be?”
He listened, staring straight ahead, while Spenton explained how it had come to pass that Michael Bord on was now the owner of a piece of land adjoining the stream, about halfway through the Dene. It was a saga, as he related it: the offer of reward, the young man’s very affecting wish to acquire the land for his father with the money, and then, following hard upon this, the father’s death in an accident at the pit. “He was dead when they got to him,” he said. “It seems that he was killed outright by the fall. Even if they had reached him sooner, it would have been to no avail.”
But Kemp had no thought to spare for this obscure and irrelevant death. “You sold the land without so much as consulting me, the lessee?” There was fury in his face and his voice. The agreements for the lease had been drawn up and signed; he was no longer Spenton’s guest, there was no need now to countenance the man’s follies. “You have done a most ill-considered thing, sir,” he said. “And for the idlest of reasons.”
Spenton’s face did not change, but his voice was colder when he answered. “I suppose you do not think I should refer to you for my reasons? They seemed sufficient to me. The Dene does not form part of the mine. You are not thinking clearly, Kemp. How on earth was I to know that you had this plan in mind? You chose not to broach the subject while you were staying with me. Do you think I am a mindreader?”
There was justice in this, he was compelled to recognize; the caution that had kept him silent had been needless, due only to inveterate habit. But the knowledge did nothing to lessen the rage he was laboring under. Spenton’s smile had deepened with this last question; it seemed that in some outrageous and incomprehensible way he was finding the situation humorous. And not only that: it was clear that his sympathies lay with this miserable pitman rather than his partner in business. “There is no great harm done,” he said now.
“What can you mean? There is no other route than the bed of the stream. The land ends in cliffs on either side. The slopes of the ravine are too steep—we could not build a road that would be safe from slipping under such heavy loads.”
“The young man is far from stupid. No doubt you will be able to reach some settlement with him. It will involve you in expenses, of course, but that is no great objection, as far as I can see.”
There had been a note of contempt in this, quite undisguised, and Kemp knew as he got up to leave that Spenton too saw no further need for conciliation between them, knew that just as he resented the nobleman for the privilege that surrounded him, for his air of immunity to the common struggle, so Spenton disliked him for the fact that he had been through that struggle and acquired wealth from it—wealth in the form of capital, not land. The nonchalance of manner was a form of hostility, expressing disdain for the mercantile class Kemp knew himself to represent, which grew always richer, always more threatening to the power and influence of the landed gentry. “At least,” he said, repeating the other’s words with deliberate sarcasm, “you will have no great objection, as far as I can see, to the road being built, provided of course that the costs are met by the lessee.”
“None at all, my dear sir, good heavens, no,” Spenton said, and Kemp detected in his voice and look the complacent knowledge that profits deriving from the road would continue to accrue long after the lease had run out. He had considered the matter after all, without appearing to. He was far from indifferent to his own interests, despite the assumption of vagueness. This was the knowledge that Kemp bore away from the interview, a certain sense of duplicity on Spenton’s part, together with the conviction that the dislike thus revealed between them would prove to be lasting.
He would have to return to Durham sooner than he had intended, more or less immediately in fact, and endeavor to come to terms with this Michael Bordon, if possible buy him out. He would stay at an inn somewhere within a few miles, he would go nowhere near Wingfield. But he had to see Jane before leaving. The need for her to know at once of this new development was urgent with him; without thi
s, without her blessing on the enterprise, he would be weaker. On arriving home again, he at once sent Hudson with a note asking if he might be allowed some minutes of her company, and obtained an appointment for that afternoon. She had paid—as always when she knew she was to see him—particular attention to the details of her appearance, and Kemp was smitten anew by the radiant pallor of her face, the beauty of her eyes and brows, the alluring grace of her movements in the lilac-colored taffeta gown, close-fitting at the waist and hips, as was then becoming fashionable.
“He has never shown any real interest in the running of the mine,” he said. “In all the time I have known him he has never shown much interest in anything but sopranos and waterworks and clockwork toys and handball.”
It smarted still that Spenton should have waited so long, sported with him, before coming out with the fact that a piece of the Dene had been bought. Kemp had begun with this news, wanting her to know at once the blow to his plans. “Buffooneries of that sort,” he said with contempt. “I shall have to return to Durham as soon as possible. This Michael Bordon is young and illiterate, he has never known anything but laboring in a pit. He may not realize the value of the land he has bought. If I can get to him in time, I may be able to prevail upon him to sell at a reasonable price.”
“But I understand that he bought the land as a gift for his father, to free him from the mine. This being so, he is not likely to sell it, surely—it would be like a kind of betrayal, wouldn’t it, changing his mind like that and taking money instead?”
“No, I forgot to tell you, the father is dead. I thought at first that the deed was in his name and that it might be possible to have it annulled with his death, but unfortunately it is made out to the son.”
“Forgot to tell me?” Jane looked closely at him, as if there might be something in his expression, some quality of sympathy or regret not evident in his words. But she could see nothing of the sort there, only the look she had always found so compelling, the dark, level brows, the eyes brilliant, full of light, the mouth firm set as if there were something to be resisted or endured, but not mean or ungenerous. It was the look that came to her mind when she thought of being with him, sharing his life. “But it is the most important thing of all,” she said. “He will want to keep the pact, keep faith with his father. He will want to fulfill his father’s wishes for the land by cultivating it himself, growing the things his father wanted to grow. He would be right to do that, surely?”
The Quality of Mercy: A Novel Page 29