The Quality of Mercy

5



It was the purse that brought an end to Sullivan’s brief period of affluence, while at the same time signaling its peak—the purse, and with it, in disastrous combination, a misplaced sentiment of fellow feeling. In all the years of his life—years of poverty and vagrancy from early adolescence onward—he had never possessed such a purse; in fact, he had never possessed a purse at all, keeping what coins he had in a cloth bag inside his shirt. And he was, in any case, particularly vulnerable to tricksters during this period of his life, being unused to money and in a way innocent about it after the years in the Florida settlement. They had traded, but there had been no use for coins.

For all it was so fleeting, he was always to remember the sense of wealth and well-being that the beautiful purse and its contents had brought him. They became linked in his mind with his miraculous escape, the supremely fortunate encounter by the wayside, a time when he had been a man at large, a man under a vow, with a destination, in stout boots and a good coat with brass buttons. Though in the end not much was to remain to him but the destination and the vow, he was always to think of these few days as constituting one of the highlights of his life.

The wagon put him down in Bedford on the evening of the following day, when it was already dark. Guided by his new sense of himself as a traveling man with the power of purchase about him, he chose an inn in the high street with a good front, the Golden Cockerel, a name that seemed appropriate to his condition. The landlord, however, was not at first in full accord with Sullivan’s vision of himself, perhaps suspicious at the discrepancy between the good clothes and the wild hair and ragged beard. Then there was the Irish accent, the haggard looks, the vagabond’s fiddle over the shoulder. He wanted a shilling in advance, he said.

So it was the landlord of the Golden Cockerel who had the first sight of the purse and its contents. Sullivan was later to wonder whether this man, who smiled upon him when he saw the money, was in the plot too. But no shadow of doubt troubled him at the time; he took pleasure in the display, and bore himself in lordly fashion.

He dined well on sheep’s liver chopped and grilled, accompanied by roast potatoes, the whole washed down by a quart of ale. It was the best meal he had eaten for months, since the yams and sweet potatoes and marsh birds of the settlement. He slept soundly, breakfasted heartily and paid the balance of his score to the now friendly landlord.

It was a man transformed who walked down Bedford High Street that morning. To make matters even better, the weather had changed; he emerged from the inn to sunshine and a blue sky. It was the last day of March. Spring had arrived; he saw a cherry tree with buds of flower in a sheltered courtyard. Always mercurial, Sullivan felt his life to be full of blessings, and he began, as his habit was, to count them over. He was well clear of London, no one could know which way he was headed, there could be no alarm put out for him here. The fetid cell in Newgate Prison, where he had lain in fetters with his shipmates since arriving in England, the fear of the noose that had accompanied his days and nights—all this fell away from him. He was going to do his duty by poor Billy Blair. He was a man who kept his vows. And in the knowledge of this he held up his head and walked with a light step.

He had clear intentions for this morning. He would make the rest of his appearance tally with the coat and boots, the whole to be in perfect keeping with a purse-bearing man. A more prudent person, knowing the long journey that lay ahead, might have kept his money closer about him. But Sullivan was improvident by nature, and he had spent years in the wilderness of southeast Florida, where the future was not much considered except in terms of the weather it might bring.

First he purchased, for sixpence, a canvas bag suitable for a traveling man. Since he had no other possessions at all, it would do well for his fiddle and bow. His next care was to find a barber. The one he found was also a wigmaker and made efforts to sell Sullivan a white silk wig that would have cost him more than half his store. He resisted this, however. He was proud of his hair, which was dark and luxuriant.

“I am not enterin’ in the merits of wigs as such,” he said. “I know well that they are widespread throughout the land. There will be those with a thatch that is wearin’ sparse, there will be those that are wishin’ to make themselves stand taller. But a man with a head of hair like mine would niver want to hide his light under a bushel, though willin’ to admit he is become overgrown, consequent to a neglect that there was no avoidin’.”

After the shave he had his hair trimmed, pomaded and gathered at the nape with a silk ribbon of a dark green color to go with his coat. The cost of this was tenpence, the greater part of which was due to the ribbon.

From here, the mild sunshine on his face, the effluvium from his scented hair in his nostrils, he proceeded down the street until he found a journeyman tailor sitting stitching behind the window of his shop. From the stock of ready-made clothes inside he chose worsted breeches and a good calico shirt, changing into his new clothes behind a screen in the shop.

“These I leave to your judgment,” he said, dropping his former garments on the counter. “I have some experience of commerce, an’ there is no doubt in me mind at all that you will make me an allowance for them.”

But the tailor, after the briefest of examinations, gave it as his emphatic opinion that the garments were of no value whatever. In fact, he barely touched them and seemed displeased to have them on his counter.

“That shirt an’ them trousers have been my coverin’ in good times an’ bad,” Sullivan said. “How can they have no value to them?”

For only answer the tailor pointed out that the clothes were threadbare, torn in places and stained, and moreover had been of mediocre quality even when new. The price of Sullivan’s purchases would remain unchanged at three shillings and ninepence.

“Very well, then, I will not bequeath them to you,” Sullivan said, picking up the garments and stowing them in his bag. “A man will niver prosper in this world who is lost to all sense of justice an’ decorum,” he said over his shoulder as a parting shot.

Immediately outside the shop he encountered the gap-toothed smile of a sandy-haired, thin fellow with no great air of prosperity. “I hear well that you are from Ireland,” this man said.

“I am so,” Sullivan said. “Though it is long years since I last set eyes on Galway.”

“Galway, is it? Isn’t that a happy chance now? ’Tis a Galway man I am meself.”

Often it is some slight cheating of our expectations that inclines us this way or that when dealing with our fellows. Sullivan knew he had a wealthy look about him. He was a purse-bearing man, which the other emphatically was not. In view of this, he had supposed that this fellow countryman of his, who smiled and spoke so friendly-like, would have it in mind to ask him for a small loan. He would have obliged, or so he thought afterward, highly suited as it would have been to the splendor of the morning and his new sense of himself. He would have given the man a penny or two, together with some good wishes for his subsequent career.

But no such request was made to him. “This meetin’ has done me a power of good,” the man said. “To see a fellow Irishman risin’ in the world, it gives us hope for a future better than what is offered in the present, through no fault of me own. I hope you will be crossin’ the water again soon, an’ seein’ them you hold dear.”

Sullivan, who had been left to his own devices at the age of fourteen and had not set foot in Ireland for more than twenty years, felt some prickle of tears at this reference to home and dear ones. And when the man did not attempt to beg from him, and seemed about to move away, he reached out and took his arm. “Well,” he said, “we can take a pot of ale together before we part, for the sake of the dear old days that are no more. You are of these parts, as I suppose, so you will know of a place.”

The man showed every appearance of pleasure at this suggestion. “Murphy,” he said, holding out his hand. “Patrick Murphy.”

Sullivan was about to say his name, but then recalled that he was on the run, a fact he had been overlooking all that morning. They might be posting handbills up … “Corrigan,” he said. “Michael Corrigan.”

If the other noticed this hesitation, he did not remark on it. “I know the very place,” he said. “You look like a man that might have music in him. There is some come into the town that sings an’ plays on the drums an’ hautboys. Everywhere they go there is crowds follerin’ after. I have heard them meself, an’ they are ravishin’ on the ears. They are performin’ in a tavern nearby this very place where we are standin’. It is the innkeeper pays them, because of the people they bring in.”

“Music, is it? You are lookin’ at a man who has lived by his music in days gone by. Me fortunes have changed for the better lately, but it is a power that never quits you.”

He followed his newfound companion through narrow streets until they reached a low-fronted hostelry from which the sounds of singing carried to them as they approached. The taproom was crowded, people were standing close together, there was no room for sitting. They had entered at the close of a song and the applause rang round them. Four men faced the audience on a raised platform. One of them, who had a drum slung across his chest, was black.

Sullivan gave his order to a man in an apron weaving through the crowd with a loaded tray. “We will do the payin’ when you do the deliverin’,” he said to the man, and then, to his companion, “I wasn’t born yesterday. There is such a thing as trustin’ our fellow man over an’ above what is reasonable. He might say he had niver had the money.”

Patrick Murphy’s reply to these words of wisdom was not audible, as at this moment there came a rattle from the drum and a sustained note from the oboe, and the group launched into song.

No weather can stay us when sailing for home,



No roads too rough for our steps to traverse …



It was in a way unlucky for Sullivan, in these special circumstances, that it should have been a song of exile and homesickness, and that one of the singers should have been a black man. He lost for some moments all sense of his surroundings, swept by a wave of sorrow and longing, remembering the last night of the settlement, when they had gathered to celebrate the birth of Neema and Cavana’s baby. He had played like a demon that night, there had been singing and dancing, the widow Koudi had smiled at him and he had felt he would not be unwelcome in her bed. All the while, unknown to them, the redcoats were waiting above them, among the trees, waiting for dawn, for the signal to attack …

Coming back to himself, he was aware of tears in his eyes. He turned his head to say something about the beauty of the singing, but Patrick Murphy was no longer there. And the sound of the voices was strangely muted as he thrust a hand into his coat pocket and found that the purse was no longer there either.