The Quality of Mercy

9



Ashton alighted from his chair on the eastern side of Bridewell and approached the prison by the covered passageway that led toward the entrance gates to the Keeper’s Lodge. After some twenty yards he emerged into the open at a point immediately below the outer wall of the prison, whose five stories rose sheer above him. From one of these floors, as he passed, a chamberpot was discharged, and he narrowly escaped being fouled by its contents. Sounds of pain and riot rose to him from the gratings of the cellars where the condemned were held.

He stated his business to the turnkey at the gate, a man of unsavory appearance and unsteady with drink. Stating his business, however, was not enough to gain him entry. The turnkey asked for a shilling, which he declared to be the usual tariff, but was then visibly content to get the threepence that Ashton handed him through the bars.

Oppressed by the stench and grimness of the place, Ashton took refuge in levity. “Well, my friend,” he said, “if it will keep you drunk the longer, I suppose it has to be seen as a good cause. It is not surprising that a gatekeeper to the infernal regions should ask for a sweetener—there is good precedent for it.”

No reply to this was forthcoming. He was led across the short yard to the Lodge, where he found two assistant keepers making up a tray of wheat bread and sliced pork.

“You the visitin’ gen’leman what ordered up the vittles for the press yard?” one of them said at sight of Ashton. “Sixpence ha’penny, yer pays beforehand an’ takes the tray yerself. If yer wants it taken up, that will be eightpence.”

“I can eat better than that round the corner at half the cost,” Ashton said.

“Ah, yes sir, but yer not suffrin’ from the ’andicap of bein’ in confinement, are yer now? Prices is subjec’ to circumstance, every mother’s son knows that.”

“I see you are a philosopher,” Ashton said. “I am not he who ordered the food, I have nothing to do with the press yard. I want to speak to the Keeper. I want to ask him for an hour or so with the seamen who are awaiting trial on the piracy charge.”

“Them as threw the blacks over the side an’ rose agin the captain an’ made off with the ship?”

“Those are the men, yes,” Ashton said, impressed again by the way in which these separate events were taken as belonging all together in the popular mind.

The man looked Ashton over for a moment, taking in the cut and material of his clothes, the silk cravat, the ebony cane. His nostrils twitched at the smell of the vinegar. “The Keeper ain’t ’ere today, sir,” he said. “He is rangin’ abroad on matters of public concern.” The other man sniggered at this but said nothing.

“To whom can I apply, then?”

“There is several of ’em, as I recall. An’ yer wants to see ’em all at the same time. That means two armed men to keep a watch out an’ prevent ’em doin’ you a mischief.”

“That is not likely. I am here to help them.”

He had time privately to acknowledge that this was not strictly true before the man said, “Goin’ by time an’ ooman resources, that comes to one shillin’ an’ sixpence, sir. Cash down.”

“Don’t you get wages?”

At this both men smiled broadly, the first smile he had seen on either of their faces. “Wages, ho yes,” the younger one said. “What is them?”

On handing over the money, he was led to a narrow, evil-smelling courtyard immediately behind the lodge. The gate to this was unlocked to him; he was joined shortly by two taciturn men with pistols at their belts and staves in their hands, and the three of them waited in silence between the high walls of dark brick that enclosed the yard.

Ashton stared at the wall before him, trying to rehearse in his mind the best way to conduct the impending interview. It was of first importance to gain the men’s confidence, try to break down the distrust they would feel toward any that came with seeming authority from the world outside. Only thus could he lead them the way he wanted them to go.

Lost in these thoughts, he was startled, almost, to hear the rattle of the gate and see the men being led in. Among the variety of experiences that the case of the Liverpool Merchant had in store for him, this first sight of the remnants of the crew was to remain one of the strongest and most lasting. He had thought much of these men, but always as a group, undistinguished one from the other, a single body with a single mind, under the captain’s orders at first, then joined in rebellion. It was with a distinct sensation of surprise that he noticed now the differences in feature and stature among them as they came through the gate, and saw the glances, bemused and uncertain, of those who have been thrust out of dimness into light. All were bearded and unkempt, but he noted that one was squat in build and strongly made and vacant in looks, a second ill-conditioned in expression, with jaundiced eyes, another hulking of form with a shambling walk and only one eye that was of use to him—the white blob of the dead one had a steadiness both sinister and droll, strangely at odds, in its fixity, with the blinking of the other.

“I had believed there were eight,” he said to one of the guards.

“One got clear away,” the man said. “The luck of the devil, he got hisself mistook for someone else. The fiddler, that was.”

Once through the gate and into the yard, the men wavered forlornly together for some moments. Then, as if by a common instinct, they moved to the near wall and took up positions there, with their backs to it.

“Will you go outside the gate?” Ashton said to the guard who had spoken. They would be out of earshot there; the men would be more at ease. “You can keep us under observation just as well from there, and intervene quickly enough if there is any sign of trouble.”

“Our orders was to keep close,” the man said. “Anythin’ untoward, an’ it is on our heads.”

“There is such a thing as dooty, sir,” the other guard said. “Me an’ Jemmy is very partic’lar in doin’ our dooty.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Ashton said. “There is sixpence for each of you if you will do as I ask.”

The hesitation was of the briefest; it seemed to Ashton that he had barely finished speaking before the men’s hands were reaching out to him. Only when they were outside the gate did he turn to the men against the wall. “I have come here to help you,” he said, and the partial lie steadied him, gave force to the words that came next. “I do not represent the prosecution. I will not take advantage of anything you say to me, unless I can do you good by it. I want you to trust me.”

He saw one of the men, gray-bearded and seeming somewhat older than the rest, glance up, saw a twist come to his face that might have been a smile. “Trust don’t come into it,” this man said. “Yer might as well talk of trust to a rat in a hole. We are lost men.”

“Your cause is not lost,” Ashton said. He had noticed the total lack of deference in addressing him. “You are?”

“Hughes, my name.”

“We calls him the Climber.”

This had come from one of the men against the wall, Ashton was not sure which. “Why do you call him that?”

“He was allus climbin’ to get away on his own, up on the top trestles,” the one-eyed man said. “He don’t like anyone close.”

“I see.” A sense came to him of the torment such a man must have suffered, chained and penned up with the others. Even in prison the quality of suffering would vary. Had it come home to Hughes that he had helped to inflict suffering even worse on the slaves below decks? Probably not. “Is there one who will speak for all?” he said.

There were some moments of hesitation, then one of the men raised his head to look squarely at Ashton. “I can speak for the others, sir,” he said, “seein’ as I was the carpenter, an’ therefore rankin’ above, as it is so considered aboard ship.”

“What is your name?”

“My name is Barber, sir, William Barber.”

“Can you tell me how it came about that the negroes were thrown over the side?”

“It was the capt’n’s orders,” the one-eyed man said before the carpenter could speak. “We was only obeyin’ orders. We was all in it together. On a ship you does what you’re told to do by them that is set above you.”

“That is true, I suppose,” Ashton said. “But surely there is still a choice to be made? After all, there is a higher law than that of a ship’s captain. No man can be obliged to act against his conscience.”

Hardly had he uttered the words before he knew them for untimely and out of keeping. But it was his habit to utter general statements of a moral kind, and though these were felt sincerely, he did not always pause to consider whether it was the right moment for them.

“Them that has not been at the orders of a slavin’ skipper can have no opinion. Show me a conscience that will stand up to the cat-o’-nine-tails, I would like to see one.”

This had come from Hughes, and Ashton was wondering whether he should attempt a reply to the effect that the threat of flogging would have been of no avail if the crew had been united in opposition, when another voice was raised. “Beggin’ your pardon, sir, I was in the galley, I did not come out on deck till hearin’ Mr. Paris call out an’ then the pistol shot that came after.”

“That is Morgan, sir, the ship’s cook,” Barber said. “It is true that he was in the galley at the time, we can all swear to that.”

“Will you go on with your account?”

“The slaves was dyin’ in numbers, sir, both the men and the women. There was the bloody flux among them, an’ it was gainin’ ground day by—”

“What is that?”

“It is when they passes blood, beggin’ your pardon. What they eat is turned to blood inside of them, they passes it with their excrements an’ they gets weaker an’ dies from one day to the next. The ship run into squally weather, we had to fasten down the hatches on them, they had no air, sir. On that mornin’ we are talkin’ of, when we opened the hatches we found twelve dead, countin’ men, women and boys. I remember well the figure because it was what Thurso began by tellin’ us. He called us to a meetin’, you see, sir, the ship’s officers that was left.”

Hughes let the words wash over him without paying much heed to the meaning. It was an old story; too much had happened since. He looked up to the strip of sky above him. It was blue, hazed with the smoke of the city. With what seemed something more than an accident of timing, pigeons flew across that narrow space as he looked up, glinting in the sun, birds of silver. Even amid the stench of his person and that of his shipmates, even in the misery and filth of this place, he seemed to sense the burgeoning of spring. He scanned the wall across from where he was standing. Sixteen, eighteen feet. There were cracks in the brickwork and small hollows where the mortar had crumbled from the joints. Given time, given a bit of luck … He did not really believe it; he was old now, nearly fifty, his muscles had stiffened in prison; a bad fall, and he could cripple himself. On crutches to the hangman …

He had always been a climber, always first in the tops. In the dark misanthropy of his nature he had found joy in sleeping away from the others, slung high aloft, swaying in his sleep with the sway of the ship. In the years of the settlement too he had kept apart, always happiest at a distance from his fellows, making platforms up in the trees where he could hide away. Suddenly now, in the midst of the voices, a memory came to him. He had been high up in a jungle cluster, overlooking a freshwater pool. The white-tailed deer came to drink there; bow and arrows on the platform beside him, he had been waiting to see them come stepping through the trees. If you chose the right moment, when the deer lowered its head to drink, you could break its neck with a single bolt. Waiting there in solitude—it was one of his last memories of happiness. And it had been then, in those moments, that he had looked seaward and seen the schooner, wondered why it dallied there at anchor, not knowing that aboard her was a man named Erasmus Kemp, who had come to destroy them.

This was the man who had taken him and set him here in this hateful, choking closeness to others, a closeness there was no escaping, that had brought out a spirit of murder in him—not against his mates, who were caged and helpless as he was, but against those outside, those who had done this to him, who still lived in freedom.

“He put it to us fair and square,” Barber said. “There was the bosun an’ the first mate an’ the cooper, Davies, an’ me. We was all the officers what was left, d’ye see, sir?”

“Not the doctor?”

“No, sir, Mr. Paris was laid up with a fever. Well, he was comin’ out of it, but he was keepin’ to his quarters below. I think we all knowed that was why Thurso called the meeting when he did.”

“What do you mean?”

“Them two never got on. Thurso didn’t want no argument, he never liked anyone goin’ agin him.”

“I see, yes. So he put the matter to you …”

“The slaves was dyin’, we had been blown off course, we was still a good many days from Jamaica. Them as died aboard was of no value, but if they was jettisoned with lawful cause the ship’s owner could claim insurance. Thurso said he would make sure every man jack of us got a piece of that money.”

“It is easy to promise money that is not your own,” Ashton said. “Would you be ready to swear in court that the captain offered you a bribe to do as he wished?”

It was a false move, too precipitate; he saw it immediately in the faces that were turned to him, the stillness that seemed to descend on the forms of the men as they stood there against the wall. No answer was made to his question. After some moments the carpenter said, “Then there was the shortage of water, sir, that was what made it legal-like.”

“Are you sure water was short? Had you been placed on rations?”

“That I don’t remember,” Barber said. “Any of you lads remember if we was rationed for water?”

No reply came to this, and there was no movement among the men.

“There had been copious rain during the night, or so I am given to understand,” Ashton said.

“Water was short,” Hughes said. “We was aboard the ship an’ you wasn’t.”

In spite of himself and the resolution of forbearance he had made, Ashton stiffened at the insolence of this, and raised his head to meet the man’s gaze directly. He saw dark eyes that made no move to evade his own; there was a fire of violence in them such as he had rarely seen. For the first time he felt glad of the presence of the armed guards just beyond the gate. He needed only to raise his hand to summon them.

“Please listen to me,” he said. “I understand why you should want to maintain the legality of drowning your fellow human beings—for that is what they were, made in God’s image, just as you and I are, and completely unoffending. But there is no protection for you in this, even if it could be proved. It is no defense, with the capital charges of murder and piracy you will be facing, to plead that the jettison was lawful, that you were laboring under necessity. That is the line the ship’s owner will take, Mr. Erasmus Kemp. He will be supported in it by the testimony of the first mate, Barton. By asserting that there was a shortage of water, you will only succeed in helping Kemp to obtain the insurance money he is claiming on the deaths of these poor people. Surely you can see that? Kemp is the man who brought you to this ruin.”

No answer came to this, and he saw no change in the attitude of the men. He had been too optimistic. How could they regard him as a friend, as someone who desired to help them? He came from the world outside the prison, the world that asks questions, calls people to account. He needed their trust, he was exerting himself on their behalf, but it was not to save them from the gallows—this he admitted freely to himself. Their ultimate fate did not really matter to him, he did not feel concerned in it. Through them, through the public notice they might draw to this atrocious crime, thousands of lives might be changed, might be saved.

He still had his appeal to make. He had been wrong to hint at blame. It was essential now to get them back to the narrative, bring them together again in the effort of recollection. “So all the crew were involved in it?” he said. “In the casting them over, I mean.”

“Yes, all of us,” Barber said. “That is, all of us ’cept for Morgan and Hughes. Morgan was in the galley an’ Hughes was up aloft, keepin’ an eye out for the weather.”

Once more Ashton encountered that fearsome regard. Unlike Morgan, Hughes had not tried to exculpate himself; he had not deigned to.

“We had to make a ring round them in case they tried to run,” Barber said.

“I was one of them that done the handlin’,” the one-eyed man said. “Me an’ Haines an’ Wilson was the ones that hoisted them over.” It was clear that he had misunderstood the whole tone of the conversation, the defensiveness of his shipmates. He had spoken in an ingratiating manner, addressing himself directly to Ashton, as if it were a mark of his virtuous character that such a trust should have been placed on him. “Us bein’ the strongest,” he said. “Me an’ Haines was close, both bein’ London men.”

“Haines was the bosun, dead now,” Barber said. “He was killed by Indians in Florida when we was first tryin’ to settle there.”

“Haines got what he deserved. He was a bastard of a flogger an’ you was his lick-spittle, Libby.”

This came from Hughes, who had briefly transferred the anguish of his rage to the hulking man beside him. That Libby made no direct reply to this was a sign, as it seemed to Ashton, both of the truth of the assertion and of the menace that emanated from the speaker.

“Haines was set over us,” Libby said, for all answer, adding after a moment, “I am a man what respects them that is set over us.”

His single eye was flickering, as if the light in the yard were too strong. It came to Ashton that he might be on the way to blindness. He was clearly a man by nature subservient, eager for the protection of authority, a tendency likely to grow stronger if sight were failing him. He might be useful. If handled in the right way, he might be persuaded to go counter to the version of events the others had collectively agreed on. Worth remembering, in any case …

“And so this business was halted by the appearance on deck of Matthew Paris, the ship’s surgeon?”

“That is correct, sir, he came up from his sickbed onto the quarterdeck an’ he held up his hand an’ cried out agin it.”

“I see, yes.” A sudden vision of that distant intervention came to Ashton: the rain-washed deck, the cry, the raised hand, the violent aftermath. “That is what gave you pause,” he said.

A thin, fair-haired man standing beside Libby now spoke for the first time. “We was busy keepin’ the ring, keepin’ a watch for any that tried to run. We didn’ know at first where the shout come from—it was like it come from the sky, an’ he was pointin’ up to the sky when he come forward.”

“That is Lees, sir,” Barber said, performing once again the duty of introduction he had assumed. “He is in the right of it, I think we all felt somethin’ sim’lar. There was two that didn’ wait for us,” he added after a moment. “A man an’ a woman. They run an’ jumped over the side together before anyone could lay a finger on them. They might of been related, I dunno. Mebbe like man an’ wife or brother an’ sister. We took them aboard an’ stowed them below, men on one side, women on the other, without thinkin’ much if they might be related. It was a thought that only came to me later. To tell you the truth, sir, it is not easy to recall these things an’ not easy to talk about them, for most of us at least.”

He had glanced round at Libby as he uttered these last words. It was clear that this self-proclaimed friend of the dead bosun was not very popular among them. Also worth remembering …

“Why is that?”

“We lived together, we got to know one another, good and bad. Twelve years, sir, you gets a diff’rent view. There was fewer women than men—the women had to be shared by agreement, so as to avoid fightin’ over it. The women had to agree too, as it was decided there was to be no forcin’ of the women. When you are all sharin’ together, who is black an’ who is white don’t weigh much on the scale. As a way of judgin’ folk, I mean.”

The legal case that could be made out of the murder of the slaves and the mutiny that followed had mainly occupied Ashton’s thoughts up to now; he had not speculated much about how the survivors had lived afterward in their settlement, and it had not occurred to him that there would have been this sharing among them. He felt immediately repelled, and faintly sickened at the thought of it, black and white fornicating together by turns, a thing displeasing to God and man alike, producing a mixed race. It was not to further promiscuity of this sort that he was fighting to free the enslaved. Once free, they would be happy to return to Africa, to find dignity and prosperity among their own people. On the other hand, the deeper understanding that had come about through this experience of life together in community, if it could be voiced in court, might have an effect on the jury, as showing the absurdity of asserting a right of property in one’s fellows on the grounds of race or color.

He took care to let nothing of these thoughts show in his face or manner. It was time now to make his promise to them—first the promise, then the appeal. “You are kept in chains, I believe,” he said. “Everything has a price here, so it seems, and I will make sure that you are not fettered again, at least until they bring you for the hearing. And I will contrive matters so that you will get regular and wholesome meals.”

He saw Barber glance sharply round at the others. Libby smiled in ugly fashion, and a look of wondering delight appeared on the half-witted man’s face.

“We are beholden to you,” Barber said, and there were nods among the men, and one or two exclamations of agreement. There was no softening in Hughes’s regard, however.

“I want to make an appeal to your reason and your self-interest,” Ashton said. “There is only one way for you to escape hanging. If you will plead that you mutinied on grounds of conscience, that you rose against the captain because you realized that you were engaged in murdering innocent men and women, then you will have a chance of life. There would be no real falsehood in such a statement, only a shifting of the time. After all, you came to this realization later, during your years in the settlement. It will be argued against you that this change of heart was belated, too much so to carry conviction, as it did not occur until many had already been cast overboard to drown. But you can make reply that you were under the orders of the captain, whom you were accustomed to obey. When Divine Mercy intervened, in the person of the ship’s doctor, you saw the hideous error of what you were about and immediately ceased from it. If we can succeed in swaying the jury to that effect, it is more than likely that they will dismiss the capital charges on the grounds that there was no intention of harm, and you will go down in history as heroes of the antislavery movement.”

And if we fail, he thought, and you end on the gallows, there is a chance that you will be seen as martyrs, and that is almost as good … But no, they were not the stuff of martyrs, or heroes either; they had no voice, no attitude, they represented nothing. If by some miracle of advocacy true justice could be done and these men declared guilty of murdering the slaves and hanged for it in full view, that would be the best solution of all. Beyond hoping for—Stanton would not risk such a plea. But what a wonderful thing it would be, what a triumph! A clarion call through all the years to come, sounding the note of justice and humanity to future generations.

With this thought, his sense of differences among the men, a perception that had earlier taken him by surprise, altogether disappeared. They became once again in his eyes the featureless, amorphous body they had been before, a body that circumstance had deprived of all rights, made entirely subject to considerations of utility, of the higher and nobler purposes they could be made to serve.

“If you do not make this plea,” he said, “you will have no defense against the charges of murdering the captain and making off with ship and cargo, since the slaves will be regarded in that light. You will be condemned and you will end on the cart to Execution Dock.”

No reply of any kind came from the men assembled there. Ashton regarded them in silence for some moments, then said, “I leave the matter to your consideration. I will pray to Almighty God that you be guided to the right decision.”

On this, he raised an arm and signaled to the guards waiting outside the gate.