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convince but who constantly framed arguments more weighty than his own. For twelve years, in that wilderness, they had lived free, black and white together. Free but not equal: there must have been struggles for power and precedence among them, this was a natural feature of any human society. But the inequalities, whatever they were, would not have depended on color or race. And the people had lived in understanding of this; they had shared the women, they had shared the parentage of the children …
    “It is madness,” he said again.
    “Entirely so, sir, we see eye to eye on the matter. But the law has to deal with divergent interests.” The lawyer brought hispalms together, then slowly moved them apart. “The law has to stretch, sir,” he said. “They will maintain that it was murder.”
    “Killing the ship’s captain when he was about the lawful exercise of his duties, that is not murder, I suppose?”
    “They might claim, they
will
claim, that it was justified as preventing the numerous murders that might have followed.” With this Pike rose to his feet. “I will not occupy your time any further,” he said. “I judged it needful that you should know of these developments.” He stood for a moment longer, smiling at Kemp, who had also risen. “Have no fear,” he said. “We shall prevail. Property is the key to the business. If they fight us on property, they are bound to lose. The Lord Commissioners appointed by the Admiralty will have a high regard for property. We must hope for a judge with good understanding, someone with holdings in the West Indies, or at any rate with a stake in the trade.”
    When Pike had gone Kemp returned to his desk and remained there for a time that passed blankly, without his noting it. Then he rose and went to his window and looked down for some moments through the thick distorting glass at the blur of the traffic below. When he turned back toward the room, it was for a brief while as though everything in it were strange to him. As if seen for the first time, the framed watercolors, the ledgers and the account books on their shelves, the broad table with its silver-mounted inkstand and its japanned tray, where lay his paperknife with the mother-of-pearl handle, and his seals, and his ivory paperweight in the form of a Moor’s head.
    He could find no comfort or reassurance in any of these things, even as their familiarity returned. They expressed him, they consorted with his state, that was all. It was the same with his mansion in St. James’s Square: silk hangings and ormolu clocks and Italian stucco and mahogany paneling—costly furnishings, as befitted his wealth, but no more to him than that.
    He found himself thinking now of his parents’ house in Liverpool and of his bedroom there, the things in it that had been dear to him, abetting him in his hopes, consoling him in hisdisappointments: the silver cockspurs and the brace of dueling pistols on the wall, this the gift of his father; the framed embroidery done by his mother,
Blessed Are the Meek
, the words picked out in dark blue stitches surrounded by forget-me-nots and white roses. Like many persons of fanatical character, Kemp was deeply superstitious, though he would have been highly indignant to hear the word applied to him. The objects in that room, so clearly remembered, had solemnized his love for Sarah Walpert and his intention to marry her; they had sorrowed with him at her loss; they had witnessed his vows to go into sugar and repay his father’s debts.
    The rage was spent in him now, to leave a feeling almost of desolation. It had only been the news of Sullivan’s escape that had quickened him to fury. Sullivan, who had been so devoted to Matthew, had attended him when he lay dying. The fellow had had the presumption, in chains with the others as he was, to ask for the return of his fiddle on the grounds that it was personal property. Kemp had remembered this insolence and the look of the man as he made