The Quality of Mercy: A Novel Read online

  ALSO BY BARRY UNSWORTH

  The Partnership

  The Greeks Have a Word for It

  The Hide

  Mooncranker’s Gift

  The Big Day

  Pascali’s Island

  (published in the United States under the title The Idol Hunter)

  The Rage of the Vulture

  Stone Virgin

  Sugar and Rum

  Sacred Hunger

  Morality Play

  After Hannibal

  Losing Nelson

  The Songs of the Kings

  The Ruby in Her Navel

  Land of Marvels

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2011 by Barry Unsworth

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Nan A. Talese / Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada, Toronto.

  www.nanatalese.com

  Doubleday is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc. Nan A. Talese and the colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Hutchinson, an imprint of The Random House Group Limited, London.

  Jacket design by Michael J. Windsor

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Unsworth, Barry, 1930–

  The quality of mercy : a novel / Barry Unsworth.—1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PR6071.N8Q35 2011

  823’.914—dc22

  2011010110

  eISBN: 978-0-385-53478-9

  v3.1

  For Aira

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Spring and Summer: 1767

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  A Note About the Author

  Love to faults is always blind;

  Always is to joy inclin’d,

  Lawless, wing’d, and unconfin’d,

  And breaks all chains from every mind.

  —William Blake

  Spring and Summer

  1767

  1

  On finding himself thus accidentally free, Sullivan’s only thought was to get as far as he could from Newgate Prison while it was still dark. Fiddle and bow slung over his shoulder, he set off northward, keeping the river at his back. In Holborn he lost an hour, wandering in a maze of courts. Then an old washerwoman, waiting outside a door in the first light of day, set him right for Gray’s Inn Lane and the northern outskirts of the city.

  Once sure of his way, he felt his spirits rise and he stepped out eagerly enough. Not that he had much, on the face of things, to be blithe about. These last days of March were bitterly cold and he had no coat, only the thin shirt and sleeveless waistcoat and cotton trousers issued to him on the ship returning from Florida. His shoes had been made for a man with feet of a different caliber; on him they contrived to be too loose at the heel and too tight across the toes. The weeks of prison food had weakened him. He was a fugitive, he was penniless, he was assailed by periodic shudders in this rawness of the early morning.

  All the same, Sullivan counted his blessings as he walked along. He had his health still; there was nothing amiss with him that a bite to eat wouldn’t put right. He would find shelter in Durham if he could get there. And there was a grace on him, he had been singled out. It was not given to many just to stroll out of prison like that. Strolling through the gates … His teeth chattered. “Without so much as a kiss-my-arse,” he said aloud. In Florida he had developed a habit of talking to himself, as had most of the people of the settlement. No, he thought, it was a stroke of luck beyond the mortal, the Blessed Virgin had opened the gates to him. A sixpenny candle if I get through this. Best tallow … He thought of the holy flame of it and tried in his mind to make the flame warm him.

  He did not think of the future otherwise, except as a hope of survival. There was an element missing from his nature that all wise persons are agreed is essential for the successful self-governance of the individual within society, and that is the ability to make provision, to plan ahead. This, however, is the doctrine of the privileged. The destitute and dispossessed are lucky if they can turn their thoughts from a future unlikely to offer them benefit. Sullivan knew in some part of his mind that evading recapture would put him at risk of death in this weather, with no money and no refuge. But he was at large, he was on the move, the threat of the noose was not so close. It was enough.

  An hour’s walking brought him to the rural edges of London, among the market gardens and brick kilns north of Gray’s Inn Fields. And it was now that he had his second great stroke of luck. As he was making his way through narrow lanes with occasional low shacks on either side where the smallholders and cow keepers slept during the summer months, at a sudden turning he came upon a man lying full length on his back across the road.

  He stopped at some paces off. It was a blind bend, and an early cart could come round it at any moment. “This is not the place to stretch out,” he said. “You will get your limbs destroyed.” But he did not go nearer for the moment, because he had remembered a trick like that: you bend over in emulation of the Good Samaritan, and you get a crack on the head. “I am not worth robbin’,” he said.

  A half-choked breath was the only answer. The man’s face had a purplish, mottled look; his mouth hung open and his eyes were closed. Across the space of freezing air between them an effluvium of rum punch came to Sullivan’s nostrils. “I see well that you have been overtook by drink,” he said. “The air is dancin’ with the breath of it over your head. We will have to shift you off the road.”

  He took the man under the armpits and half lifted, half dragged him round so that he was lying along the bank side, out of the way of the wheel ruts. While this was taking place, the man grunted twice, uttered some sounds of startlement and made a deep snoring noise. His body was heavy and inert, quite helpless either to assist or obstruct the process of his realignment.

  “Well, my friend,” Sullivan said, “you have taken a good tubful, you have.” The exertion had warmed him a little. He hesitated for a moment, then laid bow and fiddle against the bank side and sat down close to the recumbent man. From this vantage point he looked around him. A thin plume of smoke was rising from somewhere among the frosted fields beyond the shacks. There was no other sign of life anywhere, no human stirring. A faint sun swam among l
ow clouds; there was no warmth in it, but the touch was enough to wake a bird to singing somewhere—he could hear it but not see it. “There is stories everywhere, but we often get only the middle parts,” he said. The man was well dressed, in worsted trousers, stout leggings and boots and a square-cut, bottle-green coat with brass buttons. “Those are fine buttons,” Sullivan said. “I wonder if you could make me iver a loan now? I am hard-pressed just at present, speakin’ frankly, man to man.”

  The man made no answer to this, but when Sullivan began to go through his pockets, he sighed and choked a little and made a motion with his left arm as if warding off some incubus. His purse contained eighteen shillings and ninepence—Sullivan had to count the money twice before he could believe it. Eight weeks’ pay aboard ship! He extracted coins to the value of nine shillings and returned the purse to its pocket. “I leave you the greater half,” he said.

  Again, at this intimacy of touch, the man stirred, and this time his eyes opened briefly. They were bloodshot and vague and sad. He had lost his hat in the fall; it lay on the road beyond him. His goat’s-hair wig had slipped sideways; it glistened with wet, and the sparse, gingerish wisps of his own hair curled out damply below it.

  “I have nothin’ to write with an’ neither have you,” Sullivan said, “an’ we have niver a scrap of paper between us, or I would leave you a note of hand for the money.” He had never learned to write, but knew this for the proper form. “Or yet again,” he said, “if you were in a more volatile state you could furnish me with your place of residence. As things are, we will just have to leave it unsatisfactory.”

  The man’s face had returned to sleep. Sullivan nodded at it in valediction and set off again along the lane. He had not gone far, however, when it came to him that he had been the savior of this man and that nine shillings was hardly an adequate reward for such a service. To rate a man’s life at only nine shillings was offensive and belittling to that man. Any human creature possessed of a minimum of self-respect would set a higher value on himself than that. Even he, Sullivan, who had no fixed abode and no coat to his back, would consider nine shillings too little. If this man’s faculties were not so much ravaged and under the weather, he would be bound to agree that eighteen shillings met the case better.

  Full of these thoughts, he retraced his steps. The man appeared to have made some brief struggle in the interval, though motionless again now. His wig had fallen off completely and lay bedraggled on the bank side like a bird’s nest torn from the bare hedge and flung down there. His hair was thin; pinkish scalp showed through the flat crown. His breath made a slight bubbling sound.

  “I do not want you to go through life feelin’ convicted of ingratitude,” Sullivan said. “You may take the view that death was problematical, but that I rescued you from the hazard of mutilation you are bound to agree on.” The purse was of good leather. Sullivan kept hold of it, having first restored the ninepence to the man’s waistcoat pocket. “In takin’ these shillin’s I am doublin’ your value,” he said. He was silent for some moments, listening intently. He thought he had heard the rattle of wheels. He went to the bend and surveyed the long curve of the road: no sign of anything. His eyes watered and he was again racked with cold. He clutched at himself and slapped his arms and sides in an effort to get some warmth into them. Still striking at himself, he returned to the victim of his kindness. “I had a coat once with fine brass buttons on it,” he said. “But the coat was stole off me back aboard ship on the false grounds that it was verminous, an’ the bosun kept me buttons though they brought him no luck. One I found again after twelve years through a blessin’ that was on me, but I gave that to a man who was dyin’. It is only justice that you should reinstate me buttons, havin’ saved you from injury or worse. If I had a knife about me I could snip them off, but lookin’ at it another way I am not the man to desecrate a fine coat … Here, hold steady.” Feeling the coat being eased off him, the man struggled up to a sitting position, glared before him for some moments, then fell back against the bank.

  The coat was rather too big at the shoulders for Sullivan, a fact that surprised and puzzled him, conflicting with his sense that this encounter by the wayside was perfect in all its details of mutual benefit. “You will be a local man,” he said. “You will not have far to go. I am bound for the County of Durham, an’ that is a tidy step.” He had been unlacing the boots as he spoke. Now he raised the man’s legs to pull them off, first right, then left. The thick legs fell heavily to earth again when released. The man’s eyes were open, but they were not looking at anything. The boots fit Sullivan perfectly. He slipped his shoes on the other’s feet. “Each man will keep to his own trousers,” he said magnanimously. In fact, he had grown hasty in the lacing of his new boots, and was eager to be off. He straightened up, took his bow and fiddle and moved away into the middle of the lane. “The morning is not so cold now,” he said. “I have been your benefactor and will remember you as mine.”

  No sound at all came from the man. He had slumped back against the bank. His head had fallen forward and slightly sideways, toward his left shoulder. He had the look of total meekness that the hanged possess, and perhaps it was this that brought a sudden tightness to Sullivan’s throat and made him delay some moments longer.

  “At another time I would have saved your life free of charge,” he said. “You are gettin’ me off to a good start an’ I am grateful.” Still he paused, however. He had no natural propensity to theft, and there was the important question of justice. Because of him this man’s waking would be unhappy. He was owed some further explanation. “I had a shipmate,” he said. “A Durham man, name of Billy Blair. Him an’ me were close. We were pressed aboard ship together in Liverpool. She was a slaver, bound for the Guinea Coast. We took the negroes on but we niver got to Jamaica with them, we came to grief on the coast of Florida. Them that were left lived on there, black and white together. We had reasons for stayin’ where we were, but I will not occupy your time with them, as bein’ irrelevant to the point at issue. Billy sometimes talked about the place where he was born an’ about his family. He ran away to sea when he was a lad of fourteen, to get away from minin’ the coal, so he said. He was always intendin’ to go back someday, but he niver did. An’ now he niver will. I made a vow that if iver I got free of me chains an’ had power over me own feet again, I would find Billy’s folks and tell them what befell him. An’ now I am bound to it, d’ye see, I can’t go back on it because me vow was heard, the gates were opened to me.”

  The hat was still lying there. He picked it up and set it firmly on the man’s lowered head. “I have spoke to you in confidence, man to man,” he said. “I am trustin’ you not to promulgate me words to any third party. An’ now I will bid you farewell.”

  He walked for an hour or so in the sullen light of morning. Nothing passed him on the road and he met no one. At a junction of lanes there was a huddle of houses and a small inn. He was hungry, but he did not dare to stop. One way led to Watford, the other to St. Albans. He took a shilling from his new purse and tossed it. It came down heads. St. Albans, then.

  A mile farther on he came up with a wagon setting off north with a load of shoring posts. A threepenny piece got him a place up beside the driver. As the wagon jolted along, he thought of his luck again and of poor Billy Blair and of the meekness of the hanged. After a while he slept.

  2

  Late in the afternoon of the day of that fortunate wayside encounter, a Durham coal miner named James Bordon, who was married to Billy Blair’s sister Nan, was standing near the head of a steep-sided and thickly wooded ravine known locally as the Dene. He was looking in the direction of the sea, which at that distance was no more than a change in the quality of the light, a pale suffusion low in the sky. At his back, little more than half a mile away, was the colliery village of Thorpe, where he lived, though nothing of it could be seen from where he was standing; cottages and surrounding fields belonged to the upper world; here below, vagrant streams, over
great spans of time, had gouged through the bolder clay and limestone to make a deep and narrow chasm.

  Bordon had not attended any school, and he could not read or write. He was ignorant of this long scooping-out of the rock, the millions of years that had gone into it. But he knew the Dene with a knowledge no study of geology could have given him. He had known it all his life; he had played here as a child, made tree houses with other children, fished for sticklebacks and newts in the beck that ran through the gorge below him, slate gray in color now, under this lowering sky. Childhood had ended for him at the age of seven, when his father, in accordance with the general habit, and as his own father had done, had taken him down to work in the mine. His father was gone now; he had died as a good number of miners did, his lungs choked up with all the years of inhaling flint dust.

  Bordon had come here straight from the pit, as he sometimes did—more often nowadays than before, as if from a need that was growing. He was black with coal dust; the acrid smell of it, together with the sweat of his labor, rose to him from the folds of his clothing, thick cotton shirt and trousers, leather waistcoat and apron and knee pads. For fourteen years now he had been a full pitman, a hewer, cutting out the coal from the face. He had worked for ten hours that day, starting at six in the morning, and he had done his stint—he was not paid by the hour but bound by contract to cut coal enough to fill six corves, thirty hundredweight, in one working shift, or suffer loss of wages if he came short of this. The condition met—and the judgment was his—he was free to leave the coal lying for the putters to load into the corves and drag to the pithead.

  He stood still now, letting the peace and silence of the place settle around him, and the strange sense of a stronger existence that came with them. He could not easily have found words for this. He was unpracticed in speaking about feelings, and there was no one, in any case, with whom he might have made the attempt, without fear of being thought softheaded. But it was mainly the reason why he came to this place, the sense of intensified life that visited him when he stood alone here. Partly he knew it, though confusedly, for the shelter afforded by the open sky, the removal of a roof too close, the fact that he could raise his head and shift his limbs freely, the steady light after the hours of kneeling with hammer and wedge at the narrow seam, in the close heat, by the variable flame of the candle.