The Quality of Mercy (30 page)

The keeper had nothing to do with the mining of the coal; he was a tenant of the company, to which he paid a fixed monthly sum, all the proceeds over that going into his own pocket. When he learned that Sullivan’s total resources, once he had paid for the beer he had drunk, would amount to only fourpence, and that he had no further travels presently in mind, he served up a pint free of charge and asked for a tune.

Sullivan obliged with a lively rendering of “The Galway Piper” and followed this with the first lines of the song:

The keeper rubbed his nose reflectively for a moment or two, then said, “Do you know any of the songs from round here, the miners’ songs?”

“No, niver a one. I know some of the Irish songs an’ some of the seagoing songs an’ bits of songs that I picked up in Liverpool, but that is the sum of it. I was niver in these parts before.”

“Well, but you could learn some. There is Sally, who does some serving round the tables. She is a local woman, she knows some songs, she sings to herself as she goes about.”

He went across the taproom as if to call down to the kitchen, three steps below. But before he could do so a woman came in, drying her hands on her apron. “That was a nice bit o’ singin’,” she said. “It was you, was it?” She smiled at Sullivan.

“This is Sally Cartwright,” the keeper said. “She could teach you some songs if she chose.”

She was brown-haired and brown-eyed and buxom. She said nothing more, but she gave Sullivan a smile he found distinctly beguiling. “I dare say she could,” he said.

“An Irish fiddler,” the keeper said. “Playing and singing. That would be something different. There is not another tavern between here and Hartlepool that would have the match of it. It would bring the lads in, and maybe the lasses too. Listen now, I’ll tell you what. You get board, and a bed in the outhouse and a shilling a week and a quart of ale a day, and you entertain the company in the mornings after eleven and in the afternoons starting at around four and going on while there are people to listen. What do you say?”

Sullivan was never afterward sure whether it was Sally’s smile and the promise of such a teacher or the prospect of bed and board and a regular shilling that swayed him, but it did not take him long to make up his mind. “I’m your man,” he said. And
I would not mind being yours, he thought, glancing again at Sally. Subject to there being no one else in the offing … “Shillin’ in advance?” he said.

“No, I cannot go so far as that. With a traveling man, trust has to be built up gradual-like.”

So all was settled, and Sullivan’s prospects had undergone a radical change by the time the company arrived. This was more numerous than he had envisaged. There was Nan and Bordon and their three sons; there was Nan’s brother, John Blair, and his wife and their two daughters and two sons. And there were several hangers-on who had got wind of the business, among them, much to Bordon’s irritation, Arbiter Hill.

Sullivan had requested the loan of a comb and had done something to restore order to the wildness of his hair. He had washed the dust of the road from his face and laid aside fiddle and bow. So it was a modified version of the apparition that Percy Bordon saw now. He was reassured, however, to find that the sounds that came from the man’s mouth were as strange as ever.

Women did not come very often to the tavern and the landlord had nothing that might meet the needs of more delicate palates except gin, so this was mixed with water and, after some expressions of reluctance, proved acceptable. The men had ale in pint pots, and Sullivan allowed his pot to be refilled. When all were seated in the taproom—Sally among them, he was glad to see—and when the lamps had been lit and hung on the walls, he began his tale.

So grateful had he been to the Virgin for securing his release from prison, so set had he been on carrying out his vow, unfaltering through all the trials and tribulations that had beset him during the weeks of his journey, that he had not paused to give much thought to the mode of his narrative, the way it should be presented. He began confidently enough with the relation of how he and Billy had seen and recognized each other in a dockside tavern in Liverpool.

“We had sailed together,” he said. “A ship called the
Sarah
.
Long years before, but when you have been shipmates together, haulin’ on the ropes together for the best part of a year, you niver forget a man’s face, for good or bad. I was playin’ me fiddle for the dancin’ when Billy came in. He was off a ship, purse full of money.” Skin full of rum, he remembered, but he said nothing of this to the assembled company.

Darkness had fallen outside, and the faces of the listeners were ruddy in the lamplight, their bodies motionless. No sound came from them.

“Billy was tricked out of his money. They threatened him with prison for debt unless he agreed to sign on for this ship that was gettin’ ready to sail—she was due to cast off with the tide next mornin’. He could not pay his score, d’you see, his purse was robbed out of his pocket. They were all in it together. Billy put up a fight an’ I got in the middle of it an’ got knocked on the head. The long an’ short of it all was that we both ended up aboard the ship, an’ she was a slaver, she was bound for the Guinea Coast.”

It was as he pronounced these last words and looked at the unchanging faces that the first shadow of doubt came into his mind. What could the Guinea Coast mean to them, what kind of picture could it conjure up? They could have no more of idea of it than the inhabitants of that coast could have of a Durham pit village. He saw suddenly, and with a sinking heart, that his story, which he had looked forward to telling in fulfillment of his vow, was dressed in the wrong colors. “That was the Windward Coast of Africa,” he said. “We traded for slaves there, an’ when we had number enough to cram the space below decks, we set off for the island of Jamaica, where it was purposed to sell them an’ buy sugar with the money.”

He paused now as if he had come to a wall with no gate in it. Silence descended on the room, broken after some moments by John Blair, Billy’s brother, though not much resembling him to Sullivan’s eye, being taller and longer-faced and having eyes closer set.

“Billy was workin’ in Sunderland before he run off to sea, a know that for a fact. He was workin’ in the shipyard.”

“No,” another man said, “it was South Shields where he went, he was loadin’ coal on the freighters. A was told that by a lad that worked there alongside him.”

Arbiter Hill now intervened, seizing, as was his wont, on the difference of opinion. “There is some as says Sunderland, there is some as says South Shields, depending on witnesses and memory. There might be others as would say something different again—Hartlepool, for example. With the time that has passed we will not obtain the final answer, we will have to box on without it.”

“What the hell does it matter?” Bordon said with sudden violence, and Sullivan saw the woman beside him lay a hand on his arm. He spoke again, but more quietly now. “Yor listenin’ to the story of what befell my wife’s brother, yor hearin’ talk of Africa an’ Jamaica, an’ you gan on with tittle-tattle about Hartlepool an’ Sunderland.”

This was the husband, Percy’s father, he who had made the kite. Sullivan found himself being regarded with eyes of a singular intensity, even shadowed as they were by the brim of the cap, which he wore well pulled forward. Here was one at least under the spell of the story, and Sullivan’s spirits lifted with the perception of this. He had wanted his words to grip and enthrall, to crown his long journey, even though Billy’s death was contained in them. He was taking a risk and he knew it. It was not very likely that news of the part played by the crew of the
Liverpool Merchant
would have reached such a remote place—these men and women did not have the look of newspaper readers. But that it was possible he had known from the beginning. His vow had always involved this risk, and the miracle of his escape had made it worth taking. The interest written on Bordon’s face confirmed him in this feeling and gave him heart to go on.

“We niver got there,” he said. “We niver got to Jamaica at all. We were blown off course. The skipper was dead by this time. We were beached up on the coast of Florida.”

“Florida,” Bordon repeated, and his voice lingered on the name.

Sullivan did not try to describe the efforts they had made to haul the ship up the creek and so conceal all traces of it. “We had no choice but to stay there,” he said. “The ship was wrecked. We lived there twelve years, Billy an’ me an’ the others, white an’ black together, them that were left. We made a life for ourselves.”

Out of duty to Billy’s memory, so they would understand the way he had lived as well as the way he had died, he tried to describe the life they had had, the ocean never far away, the lagoons and jungle hummocks and mangrove swamps, the alligators and snakes and deer, the great flocks of white herons that rose all together with a great beating of wings, flying up suddenly for no reason anyone could know or determine, settling again as if they were snow or big white petals.

“Twelve years,” he said again. “Billy came to his end there.”

“What end was that?” Nan said. “What happened to our Billy?”

“Unbeknown to us, the sojers were comin’. The man that owned the ship took some redcoats to get us. He said we had stole the ship an’ the slaves aboard her—in his way of thinkin’ they were still slaves, even after the years we had all lived together. The sojers were closin’ round us, but we niver knew it till they started shoutin’ for us to come out an’ give ourselves up. Billy wasn’t in the compound, he was outside, mebbe a mile away. He was fishin’ in the creeks with his mate, whose name was Inchebe, a man from the Niger. It was just getting’ light and these two were on the way back with the catch …”

He paused here, aware of having arrived at a difficulty but impelled still by the sense of duty, the need to do justice to Billy’s life in the settlement, all their lives. “These two were close,” he said, “because they were sharin’ the same woman. You see, there were more men than women, more than twice as many, so the women could have two if they were inclined that way, an’ mostly they were.”

“What, our Billy an’ another man sharin’ the same woman?” John Blair said. “A never heered of such a thing, it’s nay decent.”

“Tha’d rather have it t’other way round, woudn’t tha?” his wife said. “It would be decent enough then, a’ll be bound.” There had been a note of bitterness in this, as it seemed—some strain between them had been brought out by this revelation.

“Our Billy only done what the others was doin’,” Nan said. “A wouldna want two men mesen, one is enough for me.”

“More than enough sometimes,” Bordon said, and he smiled at her, the lines of tension on his face softening into tenderness.

“He shared a woman with a black man?” Michael Bordon said, but there was more curiosity than disapproval in his tone. He was wondering, though he did not say so, whether they ever came to blows over whose turn it was. How he would hate to share Elsie with anyone. Even another hand, touching her lightly …

“Yes, he did so, we all did. The woman was black too—all the women were black, d’you see, they were brought aboard as slaves.” This diversion about the sharing had distracted the people from his narrative, even as he was nearing the moment of Billy’s death. “We were there,” he said. “There were no churches an’ no priests. We niver chose to go there, we had to live as best we could.”

Bordon helped him forward again now. “What were they gannin’ to do, kill one another, fightin’ over it?” he said to Michael. “You an’ me is black a lot of the time, for the matter of that. So Billy was comin’ back with the catch, then?” he said to Sullivan.

“As they drew near, they came upon some of the redcoats, hidin’ there among the trees. Billy was in front an’ so he saw them first, an’ he shouted to warn Inchebe, an’ one of the sojers lost his head an’ he fired an’ the ball took Billy in the back as he was tryin’ to get away. Inchebe was caught with the rest of us, an’ he told us what befell, he told us on board the ship that was bringin’ us away. He said Billy took some steps before he fell, but he was a dead man before he come to the ground.”

He sought for some fitting way to close. The final words were the only ones that he had rehearsed in his mind while on the road, feeling that he owed it to Billy to give the death full detail and sum up the life at the same time. “It was a misty mornin’,” he
said. “There was always strange sounds in among the trees at that time of the day—strange till you got used to them, I mean. The feller that shot him was full of fears, I dare say, an’ would niver had done it if he had been of sound mind. Billy wasn’t took with the rest of us an’ brought back in chains, he died there, where he had been happy and free for all them years. It would be misguided to feel sorry for him. We had a good life there till the sojers came. Everyone respected Billy an’ listened to what he had to say. He was plannin’ to come back here one day an’ see his folks again, but he died before he could do it, so I have come in his stead.”

No one made any answer to this, and after some moments people began to get to their feet preparatory to leaving. Nan took Sullivan by the hand. “Tha’s been a true friend to our Billy,” she said. “A’ll never forget the service tha’s done us. It always pained me, not knowing what became of him. A was only twelve when he ran off, an’ we never heered more of him from that day on. It comforts me to know that he didna forget us, that he was meanin’ to come back.”

John Blair and his wife left without words, though whether it was disapproval that kept them silent or some sort of displeasure with each other, Sullivan could not tell. He was feeling spent—it had been a tiring day and he had eaten little—but he was not dissatisfied with the way he had told Billy’s story. He was thinking of trying to get a bite to eat in the kitchen and a word or two with Sally, who was rinsing out the tankards there, both of these things falling, as he felt, within the terms of his new employment, when he saw that Bordon, having accompanied the others out into the yard, had now returned to the taproom.